Gun-toting U.S. man flees Canadian border agents, leads RCMP on high-speed chase

Manitoba Mounties were forced to use their vehicles to end a high-speed chase with a pickup truck driven by an armed U.S. man who allegedly fled from border agents on his way into Canada on Saturday evening.

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The 44-year-old from North Dakota is in custody, police said Wednesday, and faces a raft of charges from an incident that prompted a response from multiple RCMP detachments.

Around 6:30 p.m., Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) notified police that a man who’d arrived at the Emerson port of entry in southern Manitoba via North Dakota “fled at a high rate of speed” after agents directed him to secondary screening.

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Two RCMP detachments and its Integrated Border Enforcement Team (IBET) were dispatched to intercept the vehicles on Highway 75, the most direct route to Winnipeg about 110 kilometres north.

Officers from nearby Morris, about 44 kilometres north of the crossing, were unable to stop him, and Mounties from St-Pierre-Jolys also watched as the truck’s driver allegedly “manoeuvred around” a roadblock they’d set up at the intersection with a provincial road, drove through a ditch and nearly hit an officer as he kept speeding north toward Winnipeg.

The pursuit continued until officers, based on photos, appeared to box him in using two to three RCMP cruisers, one of which suffered damage to its front end. No officers were injured.

About 40 minutes after the chase began, the man “was safely removed from the vehicle and arrested.”

Inside the truck, police found and seized a loaded handgun on the front passenger seat and different types of ammunition

“This was a dangerous situation involving an armed male fleeing the port of entry and travelling at high speeds toward Winnipeg,” Manitoba East District Commander Supt. Chris Hastie said in a press release, thanking the officers’ coordinated effort to bring it to an end.

“We are now working closely with CBSA, law enforcement in the United States and our colleagues within RCMP Federal Policing to determine why the male fled the border.”

The man’s driving-related charges include dangerous operation of a conveyance, flight from a peace officer, and assault on a peace officer with a weapon. His firearms-related charges are possession of a loaded prohibited firearm with readily accessible ammunition, unsafe transport of a firearm, known unauthorized possession of a firearm and the possession and export of a firearm and prohibited ammunition in a motor vehicle.

Earlier this year,  32-year-old U.S. citizen Sahil Aziz was sentenced to two years after pleading guilty in Manitoba Provincial Court to one charge of organizing entry into Canada (human smuggling) and one charge of smuggling into Canada credit card data possessed fraudulently. Border agents found documents belonging to another person in Aziz’s vehicle as he tried to enter Canada in February 2025. 

The Emerson crossing is also the one where a family of four Indian citizens was found frozen in January 2022. Jagdish Baldevbhai Patel, 39, Vaishaliben Jagdishkumar Patel, 37, Vihangi Jagdishkumar Patel, 11, and Dharmik Jagdishkumar Patel, 3, were victims of an apparent organized illegal people smuggling ring that was moving people during a vicious Prairie blizzard.

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