On the morning of April 12, 2016, Mekayla Bali’s grandmother dropped her off at Sacred Heart High School in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, the same as any other day. The 16-year-old walked inside, put a binder in her locker at 8:21 a.m., and walked out the back entrance nine minutes later. Over the next five hours, dozens of security cameras across town caught her pawning a ring, withdrawing cash, and circling the same city block again and again.
Then, sometime after 1 p.m., she walked out of a diner attached to the local bus depot. No camera in Yorkton ever recorded her again.
Bali was born Mekayla Margaret Kim Niebergall on July 2, 1999, in Regina. She changed her surname to Bali in September 2015, seven months before she disappeared. She lived in Yorkton with her mother, Paula Bali, her aunt, her maternal grandmother, and two younger siblings. Her grandfather had died the month before, in March 2016.
Her mother described her as shy and quiet. One of her high school friends remembered her differently, as caring, and unusually attentive to what her friends needed before they said so themselves. She played violin, took part in her high school’s drama club, and was working through eleventh grade at Sacred Heart. She had dealt with acne for years and was sometimes bullied for it, but her mother said that by the spring of 2016, Mekayla “was hitting her stride.”
One detail stood out to investigators from the very beginning. Bali normally carried a purse to school. On April 12, she carried a backpack.
In the days before she disappeared, Bali told several friends she had $5,000 saved up. Police checked her bank records afterward and found nothing close to that amount. They have never determined why she said it, or whether the figure was tied to whatever she was planning that morning.
Bali never knew her biological father. Five days after she disappeared, RCMP contacted a man named Rick Breit, who had been identified as her likely biological father, though he had never been part of her life and said he did not think she knew his name. Three months later, investigators searched his home in Saskatoon and his mother’s house and took DNA samples. Breit has said the testing tied him to nothing, and paternity itself was never officially confirmed.
At 6:41 a.m. that morning, Bali texted a friend asking for a ride to TD Bank before school. The friend said no, the bank would not open until eight. Her grandmother drove her to Sacred Heart around 8:15 a.m. Nine minutes after putting a binder in her locker, Bali left through the school’s back entrance and walked southeast along a set of railroad tracks, away from her first class of the day.
Her next stop was Terry’s Pawn and Bargain, a shop a few blocks from school. Sometime between 8:40 and 8:50 a.m., she tried to pawn a silver ring. The clerk later told police the ring wasn’t worth enough to make her an offer, so she left empty-handed. Minutes later, surveillance footage placed her at TD Bank, withdrawing $55. It is the last money anyone has confirmed she took out of her account.
By 9:10 a.m., Bali was sitting in a combined Tim Hortons and Wendy’s a short walk from the bank, a stuffed backpack on the seat beside her. Cameras caught her appearing to take her phone apart and put it back together at the table. Less than fifteen minutes later, she left, came back in almost immediately, then left again through a different door.
Over the next 25 minutes, she crossed the same stretch of sidewalk near the restaurant again and again, walking in a wide loop. At 9:49 a.m., she returned and sat down at another table. For the next 20 minutes, she worked her phone constantly, texting and making calls that, according to her cell provider, never registered as connected calls.
At 10:12 a.m., she texted her friend Shelby Hnatuk: “Hey, I need help.” Hnatuk had left her phone at home that morning and would not read the message until hours later, after the school had already called looking for Bali. Twenty minutes after the first text, Bali sent a second one: “Nevermind I figured it out.”
She left the restaurant again, and at 10:43 a.m., she approached an older woman sitting nearby and asked for help renting a hotel room. The woman said no. She did not know why Bali wanted the room, or where.
After leaving Tim Hortons for the final time, Bali walked west on Broadway Street, took a short detour down 7th Avenue, then doubled back onto Broadway and kept walking west until she passed out of camera range. For more than an hour, no camera in Yorkton recorded her.
An employee at the STC bus depot later told police that Bali asked, sometime between 11 a.m. and 11:45 a.m., what time the next bus to Regina would leave. Told it wasn’t until 5 p.m., she left without buying a ticket.
At 11:35 a.m., she texted a friend: “I’ll see you at lunch.” At 11:59, she walked back into Sacred Heart and told two classmates in the cafeteria that she planned to take a bus to Regina for a short vacation. Four minutes later, cameras show her walking out of the school for the last time.
She returned to the bus depot, this time to the Trail Stop Restaurant attached to it, and ordered poutine for lunch. Witnesses remember her there until sometime between 1 p.m. and 1:45 p.m. Then she walked out the door. Police have since confirmed, through ticket records and surveillance footage, that she never boarded a bus that day.
When she was last seen, Bali was wearing a teal infinity scarf, jeans, and a three-quarter-length coat in burgundy or purple, with her dyed blonde hair worn down and a pair of glasses on. She is five-foot-two, with naturally red hair, a dime-sized birthmark on her chin, and faint scars on her forehead from chickenpox as a child. Her official case file also lists a row of scars on her thigh from an earlier period of self-harm.
Her phone stayed on overnight. It switched off at 6:51 the next morning and has not been used since.
Bali’s grandmother arrived at the school that same afternoon to pick her up and was told Bali had not been there all day. She and Paula Bali searched on their own for hours before calling police that evening.
Paula said she briefly assumed her daughter had simply run off, the way teenagers sometimes do. That assumption did not last. Bali’s acne medication, her phone charger, and emergency cash the family kept at home were all exactly where they had been left. A girl planning to disappear for good, Paula reasoned, would have taken at least one of them.
Yorkton RCMP handed the case to the General Investigations Section after three weeks. By July, three months in, investigators issued a child search alert across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. A year after Bali disappeared, the file moved to the RCMP’s Historical Case Unit, where it remains active today.
Investigators identified one person of interest a man a customer saw leaving the Trail Stop Restaurant alongside Bali, described as stocky and dark-haired with a tattoo of a fiery cross on his forearm. After RCMP released his description to the public, he came forward and was questioned. He told police he had only been holding the door open for her on his way out and was not with her at all. Police have never charged him, and the conversation produced no further leads toward finding Bali.
Investigators also looked into two men Bali had mentioned to friends in the weeks beforehand. One, who went by Christopher, was said to be planning a trip to Saskatchewan to see his mother and meet Bali in person. Police searched his home and found no evidence he had been anywhere near the province that week. The other, a boy named Josh whom Bali had brought up in passing, turned out to be someone from a youth group she had not spoken to in years. Neither was connected to her disappearance.
Bali’s family has built a reward fund that has climbed as high as $100,000 for information leading to her safe return. By the case’s tenth anniversary in April 2026, Saskatchewan RCMP said they had received and investigated more than 1,000 tips. A handful have stood out enough to chase down in person. In October 2016, Paula traveled to Vancouver herself to put up posters after a tip placed her daughter there.
In January 2017, police on the Tsuut’ina Nation looked into a possible sighting of Bali at the Grey Eagle Entertainment Centre near Calgary. In August 2019, a man in Edmonton called Paula directly, certain he had spoken with a young woman matching Bali’s description. None of these could be confirmed. A reported sighting of Bali panhandling in Penticton, British Columbia, in January 2020, turned out, once local police checked, to be someone else entirely.
Much of what investigators still don’t know traces back to how Bali was communicating in the weeks before she disappeared. Friends told police she kept up conversations with people online under several different screen names, spread across Snapchat, Instagram, and a messaging app called Kik that lets strangers talk to each other with no friend request and no filter. None of her friends could say with certainty who she had been talking to in the weeks before she vanished.
About six weeks before she disappeared, on March 1, 2016, Bali posted on both Snapchat and Instagram saying she had no friends in real life and was looking for new people to add her. Investigators have never confirmed whether that post led to contact with whoever, if anyone, she was meeting on April 12. It remains the clearest piece of evidence behind the theory that a stranger she met online played some part in her disappearance.
Investigators wanted that history, but most of the platforms Bali used are based in the United States, and U.S. privacy law requires a lengthy legal process before a foreign police force can access a user’s messages. By the time RCMP obtained records for some of her accounts, ten months had passed. Whatever conversations she had on Kik that day, if any survived at all, have never been recovered.
Paula Bali has said for years that she fears her daughter became a victim of trafficking. The fear is not abstract. A 2019 government report on human trafficking centered on Saskatoon named Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Regina as hubs tied to the province’s transient oil and gas workforce. Yorkton sits roughly in the middle of those cities.
The case has not gone quiet. It has been the subject of a long-form CBC investigative feature, an NBC News profile, several true crime podcasts, and a CFRE-DT television special that went on to win a national TV news award and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Bali’s family has used that attention to keep raising the reward fund, which has dropped as low as $25,000 and, with help from anonymous donors, climbed as high as $100,000.
One piece of digital evidence still puzzles investigators more than anything else. Three months after Bali disappeared, a Snapchat message sent to her by one of her friends was marked as opened. Police could never determine whether anyone had actually read it, or whether the app had simply marked it that way on its own after enough time passed.
Paula says what stays with her most is not the questions but the plans her daughter never got to keep. Mekayla wanted to be a kindergarten teacher.
Mekayla Bali would be 26 years old now. Her mother still holds a vigil every April 12, the anniversary of the day Bali ate lunch at a diner attached to a bus depot, walked out the door, and was caught on no camera again.
