Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
A 22-year-old woman was found dead over the holiday weekend in Buffalo after being trapped in her car by the blizzard paralyzing western New York, her family told CNN on Tuesday.
Anndel Taylor, who had moved to Buffalo, New York, from Charlotte, North Carolina, was driving home from work at a senior citizen center and was only six minutes away by car from her house when she became stranded, said relatives who live in Charlotte and who became frantic when they lost touch with her.
Tomeshia Brown, one of Taylor's older sisters, told CNN that Taylor sent a video to a group chat with her sisters at around 3 p.m. on Friday. In the video, Taylor captured the snow and whiteout conditions. She told her sisters who live in North Carolina that she was stuck and the snow kept falling, Brown said.
Taylor called 911 and was waiting for first responders, said Brown and Wanda Brown Steele -- Taylor's mother.
"Her plan was to wait until the police got there," her sister said, but if that failed, she planned to "get up and walk once her car ran out of gas." She also said she planned to go to sleep and then try to walk home once she woke up if help did not arrive.
Her family said they kept in touch with Taylor as the day dragged on. At one point, Taylor texted one of her other sisters separately to say that she was starting to panic, Brown added.
In the very early hours of Christmas Eve, Taylor would send her last video message to the group chat. In the video, Taylor cracks open the driver's side window of her car, revealing a road turned into a barren wasteland by the snow. A van down the road, which appears to be stuck, can be seen flashing its hazard lights. Taylor wrote in the group chat that she thought the snow would probably be up to her waist if she got out of her car.
Later that morning, at around 9 a.m. on Christmas Eve, members of her family in North Carolina called and sent her multiple messages. "We texted her in the group to ask, 'Are you OK?'" Brown said. The family was alarmed when Taylor was not responding.
"Maybe two hours later, my sister tracked her phone," Brown said. "She [Taylor] must've shared her location with my sister. And it showed that she was still outside."
The family alerted Taylor's relatives in Buffalo to the address, but once they arrived, they said they saw Brown's car, but did not see her inside.
"So I put the info on a private Facebook page called Buffalo Blizzard 2022 and asked for help," Brown said. She posted the address of the tracked phone and later that evening, she got a phone call from an unnamed man. "He let us know he checked her pulse and there was no pulse," Brown said.
"I really didn't believe it," she said. "It was like a piercing feeling in my stomach, a pain I've never felt before."
Taylor's mother, Brown Steele, said she was in "shock."
It would not be until the next day that Taylor's body was removed from the car, Brown said, after a woman sent a message on Facebook to let Brown know that she had also located the car -- and her sister's body.
The woman told the family in Charlotte that she would not leave until someone came to pick her up.
With emergency personnel unable to reach the car, the woman waited until Taylor's relatives who live in Buffalo arrived. They all helped move Taylor's body into another vehicle, where she was taken to the hospital, Brown said.
After leaving multiple voicemail messages through the course of the holiday weekend, the family in Charlotte heard back from authorities on Monday evening. They were calling to let them know they were ready to go to rescue Taylor, Brown said. The Brown family informed them that Taylor's body had already been transported to the hospital the day before.
"I want to get to the bottom of why the city was unable to help," Brown Steele said.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz told Poppy Harlow on "CNN This Morning" on Monday that two-thirds of the equipment that was dispatched to help clear snow during the height of the storm got stuck.
Poloncarz added that a historian with the Buffalo Fire Department said this was the first time in the agency's history that personnel could not respond to emergency calls because the severity of the conditions wouldn't allow it. .
Erie County officials said on Tuesday that the county had restored its emergency response service, but they were still begging residents to abide by Buffalo's travel ban and stay off the roads.
CNN has contacted the Buffalo Police Department for further details.
As of Tuesday evening, Taylor's family in Charlotte has yet to learn the official cause of Taylor's death, Brown said.
Taylor was described by her sister as "a caring and nurturing person. She hustled a lot, she cared about a lot of people," her sister said.
"If she could help, she would help you," her mother said. "She had a lot of friends here in Charlotte -- a lot of people cared about her."
Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles released a statement offering her deepest condolences to Taylor's family and friends.
"Anndel was taken from this world far too soon, and words cannot begin to express the heartache and pain her loved ones feel during this difficult time," Lyles' statement reads. "This was a devastating storm that brought tremendous tragedy, and our community here in Charlotte mourns with her family."
Her family set up a GoFundMe campaign to pay for her funeral services.
Taylor would have turned 23 next month, Brown said.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.