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Justin Trudeau called the deaths of a man, woman, baby and teenager, victims of an alleged human smuggler, a 'mind-blowing' tragedy

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National Post Wire Services

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Dressed in new winter jackets, balaclavas and insulated rubber boots, a group of Indian citizens walked hours in the prairie darkness through fields of knee-deep snow hoping to get to the United States.

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They tried to follow the same route taken by three people a week earlier through southern Manitoba. But any boot prints that had been there before would have been filled with snow.

They faced high winds and temperatures so severe that a family of four, including a baby and a teen, didnt make it across the border and died in the snow.

Seven did, including a woman who had to be flown to hospital, where doctors were deciding whether to amputate one of her hands.

On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada is doing all it can stop people-smuggling across the U.S. border, and called the deaths a mind blowing tragedy.

The man, woman, baby and teenager were found dead east of Emerson, Manitoba, approximately 10 metres north of the border with Minnesota.

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The four have tentatively been identified as a family from India, part of a larger group trying to enter the United States by walking across snow-covered fields in a remote region in frigid conditions.

It was an absolutely mind-blowing story. Its so tragic to see a family die like that, victims of human traffickers and of people who took advantage of their desire to build a better life, Trudeau told a news conference.

This is why we are doing all we can to discourage people from crossing the border in an irregular or illicit manner. We know there are great risks in doing so, he continued.

Canada, Trudeau said, was working very closely with the United States to stop smuggling and help people taking unacceptable risks.

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Local officials said the incident was unusual because illegal migrants generally try to cross into Canada from the United States, rather than the other way round.

American investigators say the deaths of four people are linked to a larger human smuggling operation.

The United States Attorneys Office for the District of Minnesota said Steve Shand, 47, has been charged with human smuggling after seven Indian nationals were found in the U.S. and the discovery of the bodies.

Court documents filed Wednesday in support of Shands arrest allege one of the people spent a significant amount of money to come to Canada with a fraudulent student visa.

The investigation into the death of the four individuals in Canada is ongoing along with an investigation into a larger human smuggling operation of which Shand is suspected of being a part, John Stanley, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, said in court documents.

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According to the documents, a U.S. Border Patrol officer in North Dakota stopped a passenger van just south of the border in a rural area between Minnesota and North Dakota on Wednesday morning. Shand was driving and court documents allege he was with two undocumented Indian nationals who had crossed the border from Canada.

The van had Missouri licence plates. Agents found plastic cups, bottled water and juice, and snacks in the back of the vehicle, say the documents. The items are detailed on receipts from a day earlier from a Walmart in Fargo, N.D.

A rental agreement in Shands name shows the van was picked up from the Minneapolis airport on Monday, say the documents. A receipt shows he stayed in a hotel in Grand Forks, N.D., on Tuesday.

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At one point Wednesday morning, the van ended up in a snow-filled ditch. The documents say the driver of a snow removal truck pulled the van out and spoke with Shand. The driver said Shand told him that he was on his way to visit friends in Winnipeg.

Shortly after agents stopped the van, they found five other Indian nationals in the area. They had walked across the border expecting to be picked up by someone on the U.S. side, say the documents.

One person told officers they had been dropped off near the border in Canada and had been walking for 11 hours. A visit to the desolate area this week showed barren fields, roads covered in snow and inaccessible by vehicles, and few buildings.

They were all wearing the same winter clothing. Most were unable to speak English and spoke Gujarati, a language spoken in Gujarat, a region in western India.

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A woman stopped breathing several times as she was transported to hospital. Court documents said she will require partial amputation of her hand. A man was also hospitalized for frostbite but was later released.

One of the men in the group was carrying a backpack that had baby supplies in it. Court documents said he told officers it belonged to a family who had become separated from the group overnight.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner Jane MacLatchy told a news conference in Winnipeg that once Mounties were notified the family may still be in Manitoba officers immediately began to look in the area.

After a difficult search in nearly impassible terrain, she said officers found three bodies together a man, a woman and a baby, metres from the border near Emerson, Man. The search continued and a teen boy was found a short distance away. It is believed they died from exposure.

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It is an absolute and heartbreaking tragedy, MacLatchy said.

These victims faced not only the cold weather but also endless fields, large snowdrifts and complete darkness, MacLatchy added.

Shand was arrested Wednesday and remains in custody. American authorities allege in the documents that Shand has likely been involved in other border crossings, including two in December.

RCMP also found a backpack at what was believed to be the drop-off point in Canada. Inside was a price tag showing a price in rupees, Indian currency.

On Jan. 12, the documents say, agents found another set of prints in the snow made by three people who had walked across the border. The prints appear to have been made by the same brand of boots worn by those who tried to cross this week.

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Shand is scheduled to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on Monday.

Officials in both countries said it is more common to see crossings north from the U.S. into Canada.

Border crossings into Canada on foot increased in 2016 following the election of former U.S. president Donald Trump.

That December, two men lost their fingers to severe frostbite after getting caught in a blizzard while walking from the U.S. into Manitoba. A few months later, a woman died of hypothermia near the border on the American side.

In 2019, a pregnant woman who walked across the border was rescued after she became trapped in a snowbank and went into labour.

Emerson-Franklin Reeve Dave Carlson said illegal crossings there have dropped significantly in recent years. He was surprised to learn of the four deaths.

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If you look at the political climate on both sides of the border, its just mind-boggling to me that anyone had that sense of desperation to try and cross in extreme conditions.

Why they picked that spot to travel would be the million-dollar question

U.S. Deputy Patrick Klegstad

Deputy Patrick Klegstad with the Kittson County Sheriffs Office in Minnesota said his department is supporting the American side of the investigation. Its officers patrol the desolate open fields near the border every day, he said, and the area where people crossed is treacherous, especially in the cold. Why they picked that spot to travel would be the million-dollar question.

Klegstad, echoing Canadian officials, said its uncommon to have people make the harrowing journey from Canada into the U.S.

Its not very often we do have southbounders.

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Mounties warned that people should not attempt to cross the border outside a checkpoint, in either direction, because it can be deadly.

Do not listen to anyone who tells you they can get you to your destination safely. They cannot, MacLatchy said.

Anthony Good, a sector chief border patrol agent in Grand Forks, N.D., said anyone thinking of crossing the border illegally in these treacherous conditions should not do it.

Smugglers only care about the money they are going to make and have zero regard for lives lost, he said in a statement.

Shands lawyer, Doug Micko, declined to comment about the case to National Post.

The Canadian Press, Reuters and National Post

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They walked for hours in the frozen prairie darkness, and four didn't make it - National Post

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SAN DIEGO

The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk steamed into San Diego in the fall of 1961 with fanfare usually enjoyed by royalty, wrote the San Diego Unions Lester Bell in a story announcing the warships arrival. A swing band on a barge at the mouth of the newly-dredged harbor channel played California Here I Come, and fire boats spraying plumes of water escorted it to North Island.

The Kitty Hawk would call San Diego home for the next 37 years, before spending its last decade of operations in Japan. It was decommissioned in 2009. For the next 12 years, it would sit with other retired ships in Puget Sound, Wash.

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As is often the case, the men and, starting in 1994, women who served on the Kitty Hawk through the years came to see it as home, and many harbored deep attachments long after their service.

Im one of them; I served on the ship as an aviation electronics technician from January 2003 to January 2007, when it was based in Japan. We were always busy and always out to sea and the shared suffering forged lasting friendships among the crew.

Airman Apprentice Andrew Dyer in an aviation electronics shop on board the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk during operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

(Courtesy of James Loringer)

Veterans of the massive ship tried in vain to have it converted into a museum. The Navy was quick to reject the groups proposal and an appeal, saying the Kitty Hawk was slated for dismantling. But its longevity also may have worked against it; some potential competitors beat it to retirement. There are already five existing aircraft carrier museums, including the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. And other cities have other types of museums built around old ships, such as the Battleship USS Iowa Museum in Long Beach.

With these many museums already established, no candidate stepped up for the Kitty Hawk.

So it was that on Jan. 15 the Kitty Hawk was tugged out of Bremerton, Wash., for a slow tow around Cape Horn, Chile, en route to its final, ignominious end: a Brownsville, Texas ship breaker. Its 60,000 tons of steel will be sold off as scrap.

Ships are haunted they hold the soul of the crew. The attachment of a ship and a crew maybe transcends rational thought. You invest your energy, your emotion, your friends, your dead friends ... how many hugely emotional events in a sailors life are associated with the crew, with the Kitty Hawk?

Tom Parker, former commanding officer

The contract for the scrapping of the Kitty Hawk was awarded for 1 cent. A statement posted to Facebook by International Shipbreaking Port of Brownsville says that price is misleading.

We have received a flood of inquiries and messages regarding the Ex-Kitty Hawk.... the statement begins. ISL is providing a recycling service to the US Navy at the lowest cost possible to the US taxpayer (1 cent). The US Navy still owns both vessels and we will never have title.

Jason Chudy, a retired Navy chief living near Seattle, estimates that about 250,000 sailors served on the carrier during its lifespan. Chudy is the membership coordinator for the Kitty Hawk Veterans Association, and he was involved in the effort to save the ship from the scrapper.

We were surprised and extremely disappointed, Chudy said. The denial came back quick. We tried again, but all came to naught.

Airman Shawn Henderson waits to chain down an incoming fighter plane on the deck of the Kitty Hawk about 50 miles off the coast of San Diego in 1996.

(David Fitzgerald/The Los Angeles Times)

The Kitty Hawks keel was laid Dec. 27, 1956, at New York Shipbuilding in Camden, N.J. at a final cost of $178 million, or $1.7 billion in 2022 dollars. (Compare that with the $13 billion cost of the Navys latest carrier, the nuclear powered Gerald R. Ford.)

The Kitty Hawks 48 years of service life spanned 10 presidents and several overseas conflicts. The ship deployed multiple times to Vietnam, fought in the Gulf War and during the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At times, unrest back home penetrated the vessels hull. In 1972, a race riot erupted on board as Black sailors, frustrated with racist attitudes among White crew members, roved the ship beating their fellow sailors with pipes and wrenches. The ships executive officer, Cmdr. Benjamin Cloud a San Diego-born airman and son of one of the citys first Black police officers is credited as being instrumental in quelling the violence by meeting with Black sailors during the riot. He died in El Cajon last August.

The violence on the Kitty Hawk was the worst example, but other Navy ships had similar incidents in the 1970s. The Kitty Hawk riot led to congressional hearings.

While not participating in combat operations, the Kitty Hawk patrolled the western Pacific at the height of the Cold War, often playing cat-and-mouse with Soviet and Chinese submarines.

David Thompson of San Diego was a Navy aircrewman who hunted submarines on Navy S-3 Viking jets. Although attached to an air wing and not the ship itself, Thompsons squadron operated from the Kitty Hawk from 1979 through 1981 and again from 1993 to 1994.

This was my first ship and theres a lot of memories, he said. In 81, just after pulling out of port, I got to hunt my first Russian submarine. Ive been on several ships and the Kitty Hawk is one of the most memorable.

In 1984, after Thompsons squadron had left the ship, it collided with a Russian submarine as the vessel surfaced near South Korea.

President Kennedy with Rear Adm. Paul Masterton, right, aboard the Kitty Hawk off San Diego on June 6, 1963.

(Thane McIntosh/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Although not the first so-called supercarrier, the Kitty Hawk was hailed at the time as the forerunner of a new and greatly improved line of carriers, by Adm. Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations.

The Kitty Hawk was the next-to-last U.S. aircraft carrier built to run on diesel fuel. The nuclear-powered Enterprise was launched the same year and the Nimitz was commissioned in 1975, launching a new class of 10 reactor-fueled carriers. Two of them, the Abraham Lincoln and the Carl Vinson, are currently based in San Diego.

The Kitty Hawks diesel power plant became one of the most challenging aspects of keeping the ship operational, said Tom Parker, a retired Navy captain who was the ships commanding officer from 2003 to 2005.

My chief engineer told me once the steam plant on the Kitty Hawk is the most complicated machine ever built or maintained by human beings, Parker said. We had a problem finding engineers and were calling people back to active duty to help man the ship. We called it geriatrics for aircraft carriers.

Despite those challenges, the ship was instrumental in the U.S. military response after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Kitty Hawk, based in Japan, was the first carrier to deploy in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. By mid-October, the ship was in the Persian Gulf operating as a staging base for Army Special Forces. It would again deploy to the Gulf in February 2003 and launched some of the first sorties against Iraq that March.

An F-14 Tomcat catapults off the bow of the Kitty Hawk in 2002.

(U.S. Navy photo by Photographers Mate 3rd Class Todd Frantom)

The more than 10,000 veteran-strong USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) Veterans Club group on Facebook saw an uptick in activity when the ship began its final voyage, as former crew members started sharing photos and stories. Many said they were looking for a way to see the ship one more time before its scrapped.

Tracking updates are shared frequently in the Facebook group. Gordon Shaw, a San Diego veteran of the ship, told the Union-Tribune hes considering chartering a boat to escort the ship past San Diego.

Saltchuk Marine, the company hired to tow the ship, said the Kitty Hawk will anchor off the coast of Long Beach on Monday and should be visible from the city and from Seal Beach.

Im disappointed San Diego and the Navy arent doing something to recognize the Kitty Hawk passing by one last time, Shaw said. Its awesome to be in touch with (other veterans) and know that their time on the Kitty Hawk was meaningful and that we have something in common.

Shaw was the Repair Division officer from 1974 to 1975. He only spent four years in the Navy. He said he had a low draft number, which pushed him to volunteer for the sea service rather than risk being sent to the jungles of Vietnam.

He checked aboard the Kitty Hawk shortly after an engine room fire took the lives of five sailors. The inferno injured at least three dozen others, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command. Shaw said connecting to other R-Division veterans, who were the ships primary firefighters, through the Facebook group made him appreciate what those sailors endured in the wake of the tragedy.

These young guys went through some really hard events by virtue of their jobs and, honest to God, in my mind, they are heroes, Shaw said. There were guys that thought the ship was going to sink. These guys saved the ship.

An aviator heads toward a post-flight briefing on the Kitty Hawk as it sails off the Southern California coast in August 1996.

(James W. Crawley/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Stephen Sherman, another San Diego Kitty Hawk veteran, worked in the Crash and Salvage division on the ships flight deck, the first responders for aircraft fires. On July 11, 1994, an F-14 Tomcat crashed onto the ships pitching flight deck, broke in two, and exploded into a fireball.

The two aviators on the jet ejected and landed on the flight deck one of them in the burning wreckage of the jet. Sherman and other sailors pulled the man out of the wreckage and, although he suffered burns, he eventually recovered, Sherman said.

It was my first and only command, he said. The ship literally brought me to San Diego and I never left.

All of the sailors who spoke with the Union-Tribune about the Kitty Hawk said they believed it held a unique place in the Navy compared with other ships that have been lost to the scrapyard. Maybe it has something to do with the sheer number of lives touched by the ship over nearly a half century, directly or through the family and friends of those who served on board.

But Parker, the former ships captain, said theres more to it than that.

Ships are haunted they hold the soul of the crew, he said. The attachment of a ship and a crew maybe transcends rational thought. You invest your energy, your emotion, your friends, your dead friends ... how many hugely emotional events in a sailors life are associated with the crew, with the Kitty Hawk?

With the San Diego skyline in the background, sailors aboard the Kitty Hawk salute while lining the flight deck in 1991, as the carrier arrives at North Island.

(Howard Lipin/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

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Last voyage of the Kitty Hawk: Aircraft carrier with deep ties to San Diego heads to scrapyard - The San Diego Union-Tribune

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