Family called for help before freezing to death near Manitoba-U.S. border in 2022, smuggler testifies

As a family of four from India struggled through a brutal snowstorm that would eventually take their lives near the Manitoba-U.S. border almost three years ago, they called one of the people who had sent them there to ask for help, the Minnesota trial of two alleged human smugglers heard Tuesday.

But help didn’t come. Instead, when they told the man on the phone they couldn’t find the driver they were supposed to meet on the other side of the border, court heard he told them to turn around and head back to Canada, rather than continuing into the U.S. with a group of other Indian migrants as they’d planned.

Those details were revealed Tuesday through the testimony of Rajinder Pal Singh, a convicted human smuggler and fraudster with knowledge of the Patel family’s case who was called as a witness for the prosecution in the jury trial.

“They said, ‘This is too cold,'” Singh testified. “‘Our kids cannot stand the cold.'”

The frozen bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, Vaishali, 37, their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi, and their three-year-old son, Dharmik, were found in a snow-drifted field just 12 metres from the U.S. border on Jan. 19, 2022.

The temperature that day was –23 C, but the wind chill made it feel like the –35 to –38 range.

Singh’s testimony came on the second day of the trial of Harshkumar Patel (no relation to the family) and Steve Shand, who are alleged to have each played a role in the smuggling scheme that led to the family’s deaths.

Harshkumar Patel was arrested in Chicago in February 2024. Shand was arrested by U.S. border patrol agents on a highway in Minnesota, just south of the Canadian border near Emerson, Man., with other Indian migrants in the van he was driving around the same time the Patel family’s bodies were discovered.

Both have pleaded not guilty to several counts related to human smuggling. Their trial started Monday and is scheduled to take approximately five days in Fergus Falls, Minn., about 80 kilometres southeast of Fargo, N.D. — the closest federal courthouse to where the incident happened.

Singh said the man the family called for help was Fenil Patel, a man already charged by police in the Indian state of Gujarat with culpable homicide and human smuggling for his alleged role in the death of the Patel family.

An investigation earlier this year by CBC’s The Fifth Estate found Fenil Patel (also no relation to the Patel family) in a suburb outside Toronto.

RCMP would not say why an accused human smuggler, who Indian police say was one of the last people to see the Patel family alive, was living freely in Canada.

WATCH | The Fifth Estate questions Fenil Patel:

While Singh in court Tuesday admitted his role in smuggling people across the international border from British Columbia, he said he wasn’t involved once Fenil Patel allegedly moved the operation to Manitoba just before the Patel family died.

Witness reliability questioned

During cross-examination, which is expected to continue into Wednesday, defence lawyers appeared to question Singh’s reliability.

That included highlighting his multiple convictions for crimes including human smuggling and money laundering, his repeated illegal entries into the U.S., the multiple aliases he’s used and the fact that they say he was only testifying because the government agreed to defer his deportation for a year.

At the end of the day, Harshkumar Patel’s lawyer Thomas Plunkett said, all Singh wants is to not end up back in prison or deported back to India.

“I would like to stay, yes,” Singh replied.

Singh also testified that while he’d never met either of the men currently on trial, he thought he remembered once seeing Harshkumar Patel’s photo when Fenil Patel sent it to Singh so he could get him a fake driver’s licence – though prosecutors noted Singh had previously told them he’d never seen Harshkumar Patel.

The witness also said he recalled Fenil Patel once mentioning there were two Jamaican people involved in the smuggling operation. Court heard Shand and his wife are both of Jamaican descent.

Family’s backpack found

The trial also heard from several law enforcement officers, including a U.S. Border Patrol intelligence agent who found one of the first clues the Patel family was out in the cold that day: a backpack containing some of their belongings that was found when agents picked up some of the other migrants.

Daniel Huguley presented that backpack to the jury, pulling out the items inside one-by-one — a diaper, children’s clothing, a tiny pair of mittens — that he said made his heart sink when he found them, because he knew it meant there were more migrants agents hadn’t located.

Agent Christopher Oliver testified about coming across Shand in his van with some of the migrants it inside that day, recalling how odd it seemed to see a vehicle with out-of-state plates so far north in Minnesota — and how much stranger it was when Shand told him he’d gotten lost on the way to see friends in Winnipeg, given how far he was from the main roads.

Before the Patel family’s bodies were found, Oliver said agents found seven migrants believed to have been part of the same group. That included a woman suffering from severe hypothermia and fading in and out of consciousness.

The woman’s hand “felt like a chicken breast that had just been taken out of the freezer,” Oliver said. She was flown to Minneapolis for medical care.

When he asked Shand if there were more out there, Oliver said the accused told him there weren’t.

“People will die if you don’t tell me the truth,” Oliver recalled saying.

Migrants not dressed for cold

Court also heard from weather expert Daryl Ritchison, director of the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network, who testified the blowing snow and severe cold on that day created a serious risk of frostbite and hypothermia that would threaten anyone not properly dressed for the weather.

Troy Larson, a gas plant employee who saw Shand’s vehicle in the ditch on his way to work that day, testified the two migrants he saw in the van weren’t dressed properly for the extreme cold.

Larson towed Shand’s van out of the ditch and offered to guide them to a nearby building where they could warm up, but Shand declined, Larson said.

Prosecutors allege the accused smuggled dozens of individuals across the Canada-U.S. border as part of a large, systematic human smuggling operation that brought Indian nationals to Canada on student visas and then smuggled them into the U.S.

Their trial continues Wednesday.