The family that froze to death a world away from home

[SharonClark]

This is the saddest story I've read in a while about human trafficking - at the US-Canada border.

The night Vaishaliben Patel, her husband Jagdish and their two children set out for the US-Canadian border they dressed in new heavy winter coats and snow boots. Temperatures where they walked, in Emerson, Manitoba, had dropped more than 35 degrees below freezing.

The young family had probably never experienced temperatures that low before. Even on its coldest day, the Patels' home village in western India would not have reached within 10 degrees of freezing.

As they walked - maybe for a couple of hours, maybe for more - sharp winds carried snow and shards of ice across the plains, reducing visibility to nothing.

Canadian police found the four of them - Vaishaliben, 37, Jagdish, 39, their daughter, Vihangi, 11 and son, Dharmik, 3 - lying together, frozen, in an empty field on 19 January. They had died 12 metres from the US border.

The mysterious case of a young family that made its way from an unassuming village in Gujarat, India, to the bitter reaches of Manitoba, half a world away, has shocked Canadians and Indians alike, exposing the intense pressures and economic anxieties that may have led to tragedy.
. . .

For the rest of the article:
[link:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60290955|

[Wingus Dingus]

1. I read about that last week--terribly sad. They had no idea

what they were in for, terrain and weather-wise.

[Ocelot II]

2. Very sad. I wish they had been properly warned not to go out on foot

under any circumstances. Unless you've experienced that kind of cold you just can't imagine it.