Family devastated after body of 12-year-old Winnipeg boy who fell into Sturgeon Falls found

A Winnipeg family is devastated after the body of their 12-year-old son, who was swept away by rapids in Manitoba’s Whiteshell Provincial Park over the weekend, was found.

The body of Usaid Habib was recovered around 1 a.m. Monday.

The family camping trip Saturday ended in tragedy after Usaid slipped on some rocks, fell into fast-moving rapids, and couldn’t be rescued.

“He screamed, and he was almost halfway inside the water and he was slipping trying to hold,” said the boy’s father Danish Habib. “He couldn’t hold and I was too far from him so I couldn’t give him my hand. He vanished in the water. The water took him right away in the centre of the rapids.”

Habib says another person jumped into the water to try and rescue his son Usaid, but it was too late.

“I don’t know how to swim so I couldn’t go inside and save him. I couldn’t go inside and save him.”

The family was staying at the Nutimik Lake campground and hiked to Sturgeon Falls shortly before noon. The falls are a wide set of rapids around 130 kilometres east of Winnipeg, near the Manitoba-Ontario border.

The RCMP underwater recovery team was deployed to the area Saturday afternoon and recovered the boy’s body early Monday morning.

Tara Seel from the Manitoba RCMP says tragedies like these take a major toll on the responders.

“Just the fact that there is a lost child, that alone is extremely difficult to deal with, but also to have the family on scene, trying to keep them updated, seeing the pain and what they’re going though. It’s extraordinarily difficult for everyone involved,” said Seel.

Manitoba’s Hutterian Emergency Aquatic Response Team (HEART) joined the RCMP in the recovery efforts. Paul Mandael, the dive team lead, says technology played a part in locating the boy.

“We deployed the ROV, which is the remotely operated vehicle,” said Mandael. “Water there was 60 feet deep and we were able to find him and located him with the remotely operated vehicle.

“Being a parent and a teacher, it feels personal when that happens.”

According to the Manitoba Lifesaving Society, there are around 22 reported drownings in Manitoba every year.

The investigation remains ongoing.