She Was Trying to Make It to Canada, Died a Half-Mile Away

Authorities say a woman trying to reach Canada was found dead in northwestern Minnesota. Kittson County Chief Deputy Matt Vig tells WDAZ-TV that the woman, 57-year-old Mavis Otuteye, is believed to be a citizen of Ghana. Her body was found Friday in a field a half-mile from the Manitoba border near the tiny town of Noyes. Otuteye was reported missing a day earlier. Vig says she was headed to Canada on foot to try to reunite with her daughter. Otuteye had been living in Delaware for the past several years, reports the AP.

Autopsy results are pending, but Vig says she apparently died of hypothermia. He says temperatures were in the 40s that night, and part of her body was in a shallow pool of water in a ditch. The CBC reports the fields near the Emerson, Manitoba, border are a popular point of entry, with 477 asylum seekers stopped there in the first four months of 2017. A local official says "it was just a matter of time" before something like this happened, though "we thought maybe we would find somebody who had frozen to death, I guess, in the winter, but weren't expecting that this time of year." (More US-Canadian border stories.)