TOLSTOI, Manitoba — A family of four people, including a baby, was found frozen to death at the Minnesota border – just 40 feet inside Canada. What happened is not altogether clear, but this much is certain. Eleven people, all from India, were being smuggled into the United States from Canada during a blizzard with minus-30 chills. It was white-out dark blinding on back roads between border crossings. Here’s the best sequence on what happened that can be pieced together at this point.
January 18 (Tuesday): Eleven India nationals stocked up on on plastic cups, bottled water, bottled juice and snacks at the population 650 border town of Emerson, Manitoba. The stuffed their backpacks. Although without U.S. immigration documentation, they intended somehow to cross the border and walk to an unstaffed Keystone Oil Pipeline pumping station two miles straight south at population 60 St. Vincent, Minnesota. There they were to be picked up and driven deeper into the United State. They set out in foot, carefully out of sight of border stations. Somehow in the storm they became separated.
January 19 (Wednesday,) roughly 8:30 a.m.: U.S. border agents from Pembina, North Dakota, spotted a white 15-passenger van suspiciously traversing a farm road on flat Red River croplands on the Minnesota side of the Canada border. This was within a mile of the Pembina border station. In the van was the driver, Steve Shand, 47, Florida and two India nationals, neither of them with immigration documentation. In the back of the van were cases of plastic cups, bottled water, bottled juice, and snacks.
Roughly 9 a.m.: A quarter mile south of the border, in Minnesota, U.S. authorities found five more India nationals wandering through the storm. This was near where the van had been stopped. They said they had been walking in the blizzard 11 hours. Two had weather-related injuries and were hospitalized. They said they had become separated from others in their group, 11 people in all. They destination they said, was the Keystone pumping station two miles away in St. Vincent. They said that they had walked across the border expecting to be picked up by someone. Oddly one of the Indians had baby formula in his backpack, as well as children’s clothes, a diaper, toys, and children’s medication. But here was no child. Could there be a child out there, lost in the storm?
9:22 a.m.: U.S. border agents contacted their Royal Canadian Mounted Police counterparts, who immediately began their own search.
1:30 p.m.: Forty feet inside the Canadian jn border but 30 miles from Pembina, mounties found the frozen bodies of three individuals:
> An adult male.
> An adult female.
> An infant.
Mounties continued searching a found the body of male, in his mid-teens. This was all within 40 feet of the border.
Border marker. On Minnesota-Manitoba line.
Verbatim
Jane MacLatchy, assistant commander, Manitoba sector, Royal Canadian Mounted Police: “These individuals, including an infant, were left on their own in the middle of a blizzard. These victims faced not only the cold weather but also endless fields, large snow drifts and complete darkness.”
After the storm. Searching the wind-swept Red River flatlands.
Binational mission. U.S. Border Patrol and Royal Canadian Mounted Police agents found victims on both sides of border.