Buffalo refugee’s death ruled homicide after Border Patrol drop-off outside closed Tim Hortons

On a subfreezing February night in Buffalo, New York, a white Border Patrol van pulled into the parking lot of a Tim Hortons along Niagara Street. Surveillance video shows the sliding door open and a thin man in orange jail-issue booties step gingerly onto the asphalt, his hood pulled tight against the wind.

He tries the restaurant’s front door. It is locked; the lobby had closed for the evening. He paces in the near-empty lot, then walks away into the dark.

Five days later, on Feb. 24, 56-year-old Nurul Amin Shah Alam was found collapsed on a downtown sidewalk near KeyBank Center, home of the Buffalo Sabres. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.

This week, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled his death a homicide, concluding that he died from complications of an untreated stomach ulcer that was set off by hypothermia and dehydration after his release by U.S. Border Patrol.

“The cause of death was complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration, and the manner of death was homicide,” the medical examiner’s office said in a public statement issued April 1.

County officials said the findings mean that the environment into which the nearly blind refugee was released — alone, at night, outside a closed restaurant in winter — contributed directly to his death.

“This should not have happened,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz told reporters after the ruling was announced. “His death could have been prevented.”

The homicide finding contradicts months of assurances from the Department of Homeland Security that Shah Alam’s death “had nothing to do with Border Patrol,” and it is intensifying scrutiny of how local police, county jailers and federal agents handled a man who fled ethnic violence abroad only to die on the streets of the city that resettled him.

From genocide survivor to jail detainee

Shah Alam was a Rohingya Muslim from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, part of a minority that U.S. officials and United Nations investigators have said was targeted for genocide by Myanmar’s military. He spent years working construction in Malaysia before he, his wife and two of their sons were admitted to the United States as refugees and arrived in Buffalo in December 2024.

Family and advocates say he was blind in one eye and had severely limited vision in the other. He spoke little or no English, did not read or write and did not use a phone or other electronics. In Buffalo’s harsh winters, relatives said, he often struggled to orient himself outside their home and relied on a cane or improvised walking sticks.

His path into the American criminal justice and immigration systems began just two months after his arrival.

On Feb. 15, 2025, Buffalo police were called to a home on the city’s West Side after a resident reported a stranger in their backyard holding what appeared to be two metal poles. Officers later said the items were curtain rods that Shah Alam was using as a makeshift cane.

Body camera footage, which has since been released, shows officers shouting commands in English for him to drop the poles. Appearing confused, he swings the rods in the air but does not advance on officers. Police then stun him with a Taser, tackle him to the ground and strike his head as they move to handcuff him.

During the struggle, authorities said, Shah Alam bit two officers, leading to felony assault charges along with counts related to weapon possession. In an ambulance afterward, video shows him saying “OK” and “I love you,” phrases his attorney later said he used frequently without understanding the circumstances.

A judge set bail at $5,000. His family, advised by lawyers and immigrant advocates, chose not to pay it. They feared that if he was released, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would detain him and send him to a facility far from Buffalo, with the possibility of deportation. They decided it was safer to keep him in the Erie County Holding Center, a downtown jail, where they could visit.

He remained there for about a year.

On Feb. 9, 2026, after lengthy negotiations, the Erie County district attorney’s office agreed to drop most of the felony counts in exchange for his plea to two misdemeanors: criminal trespass and possession of a weapon, referring to the curtain rod. According to his attorney, the Legal Aid Bureau’s Benjamin Macaluso, federal immigration authorities confirmed that such convictions would not make him deportable.

Transfer to Border Patrol and drop-off

Ten days later, on the afternoon of Feb. 19, the county sheriff’s office transferred Shah Alam from its custody to U.S. Border Patrol based on an immigration detainer the federal agency had filed. The handoff occurred around 4:30 p.m., officials said.

Macaluso and members of Shah Alam’s family were waiting outside the jail at the time, expecting him to be released directly to them. They said they were not told he had been turned over to federal agents and only learned of the transfer days later.

Border Patrol held him for several hours. In a statement, the agency said agents determined that he was “not amenable to removal” — that is, not subject to deportation under immigration law — and decided to release him.

They offered him what they called a “courtesy ride” to a Tim Hortons on Niagara Street, describing it as a warm location near a previous address for his family.

A surveillance camera outside the restaurant shows the Border Patrol van arriving shortly after 8:15 p.m. on Feb. 19. Shah Alam steps out in an orange jumpsuit and soft-soled booties typically issued in jail. The video shows him pull his hood up, walk past the front door — which by then was locked for the night — circle the drive-thru lane and then leave the lot alone.

Border Patrol has said that when agents dropped him off, he “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance,” and that the coffee shop was “a warm, safe location.”

Local officials dispute both characterizations. The lobby was closed when he arrived, meaning he could not simply walk inside and ask for help. The only portion of the restaurant open was the drive-thru, accessible to cars.

“Leaving a man who could barely see or speak English outside a closed restaurant on a freezing night is cruelty and inhumanity,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, said in a statement earlier this year.

Missing person report and death downtown

After he did not appear outside the jail as expected, Macaluso and family members began checking area hospitals and homeless shelters. They searched the neighborhood where the family had previously lived, and contacted a federal immigration detention center in Batavia, east of Buffalo, believing he might have been transferred there.

Macaluso filed a missing person report with Buffalo police on Feb. 22. The case was assigned the next day to Detective Richard Hy of the department’s Special Victims Unit.

According to city records and subsequent reporting, Hy initially closed the case on the same day he received it, after incorrectly concluding that Shah Alam was in federal custody. After being informed that was not true, he reopened the file several hours later, and officers began canvassing hospitals, shelters and local businesses.

On the evening of Feb. 24, a passerby called 911 to report a man lying motionless on Perry Street, a block from the waterfront arena downtown. First responders pronounced him dead at the scene. He was formally identified the next day.

Authorities have not publicly established how he traveled the roughly four miles from the Tim Hortons in the Black Rock neighborhood to the area near the arena. Officials have said a review of city-owned surveillance cameras has not provided a complete account of his movements.

In the days after his death, Buffalo police initially told local media that it appeared to be “health related in nature” and not due to exposure. The Erie County Department of Health quickly corrected that, saying no official cause or manner of death had yet been determined and that the autopsy was ongoing.

Medical examiner: hypothermia and dehydration precipitated fatal ulcer

The April 1 announcement by the medical examiner provided the first detailed public medical assessment. County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein said Shah Alam developed what is commonly known as a stress ulcer, which eventually perforated the wall of his duodenum, the first part of the small intestine, causing a severe and potentially fatal abdominal emergency.

Burstein said the ulcer and its rupture were “precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration” after his release. The county said the examiner concluded he had been “placed into a hostile environment,” and that those conditions — cold exposure, lack of fluids and physical stress — triggered the fatal series of events.

Medical examiners use the term homicide to indicate that another person’s actions or inaction led to a death. It does not by itself mean that a crime has been committed or that any individual will face charges. That decision rests with prosecutors.

Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane said his office has requested the full autopsy report and is reviewing the case, but declined further comment. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced in early March that her office had opened an investigation into Shah Alam’s death, including his yearlong incarceration, the sheriff’s transfer to Border Patrol and Buffalo police’s handling of the missing person case.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Border Patrol, has defended the agents’ conduct. In a social media post on Feb. 27, the department said, in capital letters, that the death had “NOTHING to do with Border Patrol” and accused critics of trying “to demonize our law enforcement.”

Advocacy groups and some elected officials say the homicide ruling undercuts that position.

“He sought safety in the U.S. and instead, he was left to die in the street,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “Every single person who was involved must be held responsible.”

Imran Fazal, who heads a Buffalo-based Rohingya community organization and has spoken on behalf of the family, called the death “entirely preventable” and a “serious failure in the systems meant to protect vulnerable people.”

Disability rights organizers, pointing to Shah Alam’s near-total blindness and limited English, say his case illustrates how disabled people are treated in policing, jails and immigration enforcement.

“Neglect is never benign,” one local disability advocate said at a recent vigil, arguing that abandoning a blind man in an unfamiliar commercial area after dark, in winter, is itself a form of violence.

Political fallout and pending investigations

The case has already had national repercussions. Members of Congress from New York and other states have demanded answers from DHS. At a Senate hearing in early March, Sen. Alex Padilla of California accused then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of lying about the circumstances of Shah Alam’s release and called for her to be removed. Days later, the White House dismissed Noem, citing several deaths involving people in or recently released from federal custody, including Shah Alam’s.

In Albany, Hochul has urged lawmakers to pass a measure that would allow New Yorkers to sue federal agents in state court for violations of their constitutional rights, a response in part to legal obstacles plaintiffs face in federal court when seeking damages from immigration and border officials.

Locally, immigrant advocates are pressing state legislators to approve the New York For All Act, which would limit the ability of sheriffs and other local agencies to cooperate with federal immigration detainers of the kind used to transfer Shah Alam to Border Patrol.

For now, there is no timetable for any prosecutorial decision. The investigations by the district attorney and attorney general are ongoing. The Department of Homeland Security has not said whether its own internal review will be revisited in light of the homicide ruling.

In Buffalo’s Rohingya community, the questions are more immediate. Shah Alam’s funeral at a local mosque in late February drew hundreds of mourners. Since then, Fazal said, families who fled mass violence in Myanmar and precarious lives in refugee camps and Malaysian cities have been left wondering whether they are truly safer in the United States.

They know how his story ended: a year in a county jail, a ride in a Border Patrol van, a few minutes on a grainy security video outside a closed coffee shop, and a body on a downtown street.

“This should not have happened,” Poloncarz said again this week. Whether anyone is held accountable for a death now officially labeled homicide remains an open question.