Nelson County farmer credited with saving men from freezing to death after crash

MCVILLE, N.D. — Nobody knows the land around North Dakota better than farmers, and that knowledge proved critical after a bizarre car crash in Nelson County.

Sheriff Kurt Schwind said an unnamed farmer’s help was lifesaving after rescue crews called off an initial search for the occupants of the vehicle and nearly halted a second one.

If the second search had been called off, Schwind said, two men likely would have frozen to death.

County dispatch received the call about the crash around 6 a.m. on Dec. 9; the caller became disconnected.

“Says he was sleeping, he was in the car with a couple guys, he was sleeping, woke up they were gone, the vehicle was crashed so he started walking,” Schwind said.

The call came from a refurbished phone, so officers were not able to call the person back, but a cellphone ping brought them to the farmstead.

Bodycam footage obtained by WDAY shows a Nelson County sheriff’s deputy talking with the farmer, who was curious about all of the police activity on his property.

After searching for about an hour and a half, police called off the search until sunrise.

“It was so dark and we had some blowing snow and stuff like that, so it was really hard to see anything at that point,” Schwind said.

When the sheriff returned after sunrise, the farmer showed him something.

“That’s when the landowner realized that this gate had been broken through,” Schwind said.

The tracks the farmer and police followed for a half-mile through a cow pasture were still visible days later. A wire fence was also driven through. It led investigators to the top of a ravine, and several hundred feet below, they spotted a four-door car.

“How they got through there with that BMW is amazing, because we had to use four-wheel drive, and we struggled getting down there,” Schwind said.

At about the same time, Schwind found the man who called 911. He had climbed the ravine and sought shelter in some hay. He had no shoes or coat. He told police he was alone.

“He was in bad shape. As soon as I got him into my vehicle, he had uncontrollable shivering; he was very incoherent,” Schwind said.

As the sheriff raced the man to the hospital, the farmer, who had stayed at the top of the ravine, made another key discovery.

“He got his binoculars out and saw him sitting in the trees,” Schwind said of another man.

It took rescue crews nearly an hour to rescue the second man. According to WDAY StormTRACKER meteorologists, the wind chill was below zero.

“I think if the landowner wouldn’t have met me back over here, that we would have been recovering as opposed to finding,” Schwind said.

The sheriff said the men were traveling from Grand Forks to Devils Lake, but it’s unclear how long they were in the ravine and how they ended up several miles off the main road.

“They both had phones that had charges left in them,” Schwind said. “For some reason, they didn’t call — they only called that one time and didn’t call again.”

While WDAY News was talking with the sheriff for this story, a deputy found a jacket, boots and phone a couple hundred feet from where the first man was found in the hay. What looked like methamphetamine was found in a pill container in the jacket pocket.

The Nelson County Sheriff’s Office plans on presenting the farmer with an award for his lifesaving help.

The Sheriff’s Office is still investigating to determine if the men will face charges.

McVille is about 67 miles southwest of Grand Forks.

Matt Henson is an Emmy award-winning reporter/photographer/editor for WDAY. Prior to joining WDAY in 2019, Matt was the main anchor at WDAZ in Grand Forks for four years.