It’s April, 2016 in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, a small prairie city in eastern Saskatchewan that is home to about 16,000 people. There Paula Bali, a consultant for the Ministry of Social Services, lives with her mother, sister and three children. Paula’s eldest is her 16 year old daughter, Mekayla Bali. Mekayla is a short, thin, shy theatre nerd who wears glasses, dyes her hair often, and feels insecure about her acne and the chicken pox scars on her face. She doesn’t know who her dad is. She has some friends at school, but complains online that she’s lonely and has no friends. She makes multiple social media accounts under different aliases. Paula will later claim that Mekayla had no history of behavioural or mental health issues, but the rows of self-harm scars on her thighs say otherwise.
Mekayla has been making some odd claims at school. She’s been telling her friends that she has over $5,000 saved up and is going to take a vacation soon. She used to talk about leaving Yorkton a lot, but had stopped bringing it up. Now she’s talking about it again. Her family are not planning a vacation. She has occasionally been sending friends cryptic texts saying that she’s unhappy and needs help, but won’t elaborate. She gets a friend to drive her to the local branch of TD Bank suggesting it has to do with that five grand she has saved up, but ends up depositing $25. Mekayla doesn’t have $5,000. Not even close.
On the morning of Tuesday, April 12th at 6:41 AM, Mekayla is texting her friend asking to go to the bank again. Her friend tells her that the bank won’t open for several more hours. As usual, Mekayla’s grandmother gives her a ride to school. Once there, she puts some things in her locker and then leaves through a rear door at 8:30 AM. She first goes to Terry's Pawn and Bargain where she attempts to sell a silver ring. It’s not worth anything so the proprietor declines to make her an offer. She then walks to the bank and withdraws $55.
Her next stop is a combined local Tim Hortons and Wendy’s location arriving at 9:10 AM. This was a bizarre partnership that the two brands had entered into and a few can still be found around Canada to this day. She buys a drink, sits down at a table, and can be seen disassembling and reassembling her phone on CCTV footage. She then exits the store and immediately re-enters only to exit again through a different door.
CCTV shows that Mekayla then walked around the Tim Hortons in a large circle for 25 minutes. She then returns to the Tim Hortons and seems to be texting extensively. She also makes a phone call that lasts for some time. She texts a friend from school saying, “[h]ey, I need help" but quickly follows up with, "[n]evermind I figured it out".
At 10:43 AM, she approaches an older woman whom she does not know and explains that she wants to rent a hotel room but can’t because she’s underage. She asks if the woman will rent it for her. Wisely, the woman declines. Mekayla uses her phone again and then leaves the restaurant at 10:45 AM. She then walks to a nearby Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) bus depot. The STC was a Crown corporation that was responsible for providing intercity bus routes in Saskatchewan at the time. At the depot, Mekayla asks an employee when the next bus to Regina leaves. The employee tells her it leaves at 5:00 PM. She leaves without buying a ticket. Regina is the provincial capital and has a population of around a quarter of a million people. It’s about 188 km (~117 miles) southwest of Yorkton. To a small town prairie girl like Mekayla, Regina is the big city.
At 11:35 AM, Mekayla texts a friend to say she’ll see her at lunch. She then returns to school and spends lunch at the cafeteria with her two friends. During lunch she tells her friends that she is taking the bus to Regina to go on vacation. She leaves the school at 12:03 PM. She next arrives at the Trail Stop Restaurant which is attached to the STC depot. She orders and eats food there. Witnesses are unclear on when she left placing it between 1:00 and 1:45 PM. At the restaurant, she is seen with a muscular, dark-haired man who has a noteworthy fiery cross tattoo on his forearm. This man will be publicly named as a person of interest in the case. He voluntarily contacts the police. He wasn’t with Mekayla. He doesn’t know her. He simply held the door open for her as he’s polite and courteous. He’s cleared by police, but he is the last known person to see Mekayla. She isn’t captured on any CCTV footage after leaving the STC depot.
When Mekayla’s grandmother goes to pick her up at school, she is told that she missed all of her classes that day. She then calls Paula and the two spend hours looking for her before calling the Yorkton detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP actually take this one seriously, and launch an immediate investigation. They confirm Mekayla did not leave on a bus. They review essentially all of the CCTV footage in Yorkton. They search a wooded area near her school. They learn that her phone was deactivated on the morning of the 13th. They check all of her known social media accounts. They arrange interviews with some online friends who don’t even live in Canada, and often barely know Mekayla. They successfully subpoena records from multiple American social media companies but this takes months and leads to nothing. Her social media activity stopped on April 12th.
All of the RCMP’s digital forensics efforts seem to have been thwarted by a 16 year old girl and Kik. When the RCMP see the Tim Hortons footage they get her phone records and find no evidence that she texted or called anyone other than those couple texts to school friends. She was connected to the Tim Hortons WiFi, and according to her friends from school, likely using Kik. None of them used Kik to communicate with Mekayla. They knew she used it, but they don’t know her username nor with whom she was communicating. The RCMP have not been able to overcome this obstacle. They know nothing about her activity on Kik.
Initially, Paula thought she had runaway, but changed her mind when she saw that Mekayla had left a bunch of cash in her room along with her acne medication. She was very sensitive about her acne and would not have left it behind.
This case received huge coverage in Canada and international attention because of its popularity on YouTube. Many tips came into the police and continue to. None have led to anything fruitful. If she’s still alive, Mekayla would now be 26 years old. There is a $100,000 CAD reward for any information that leads to her whereabouts.
Dead in rural British Columbia
was the most important thing.
