The incredible journey of Maya Gebala

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Through a pair of social media posts on Tuesday, Maya Gebala’s mother showed the Tumbler Ridge shooting survivor taking in the ordinary things in life.

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A series of videos and photos show Maya petting a small brown puppy, sitting in front of a tangle of bright yellow jellyfish at an aquarium, and squirting a spray bottle. Six months after the February 2026 Tumbler Ridge massacre in British Columbia, Maya has made remarkable progress since the shooting left her with severe brain damage, forced to undergo at least five complex surgeries.

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“Small miracles day-by-day,” Gebala’s mother Cia Edmonds wrote on her Facebook page, which uses the handle Cia Later. “I’m beyond grateful for the life that is becoming. Maya’s personality comes out in fragments.”

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Maya, who was 12 when the shooting occurred, has come to embody a sort of rallying cry across Canada, a rare sign of hope after a brutal act of violence hit the remote mountain town of Tumbler Ridge with a shockwave of grief.

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On Feb. 10, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar went on a murderous rampage that left eight other people dead. Much of the shooting occurred at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, with many victims aged between 12 and 13. Van Rootselaar shot Maya three times in the head, cheek and neck.

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That day, Maya was rushed to the BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver and placed under a medically induced coma. Edmonds posted on Facebook on the same day that her daughter “needs a miracle,” and that her “12-year-old daughter is fighting for her life while they try to repair the damage from a gunshot wound to the head.” Edmonds would later say that medical staff told her that Maya was unlikely to survive the night.

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Early photos of Maya showed her unconscious and connected to various medical equipment, a deep impression visible in the left side of her skull from the gunshot. Nearly six months later, in July 2026, Gebala’s father David Gebala posted photos that show Maya seemingly pulling a face for the camera, her lips puckered in a comical grin.

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“My precious Maya, you’re doing so incredible,” David wrote on a separate photo in July, which has Maya giving a thumbs up. “Your giant smile lights up my heart. You are the bravest kid I know, and each and every day you amaze me a little more. I’m so incredibly proud of you, my sweet little Maya Bear.”

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Maya’s family has not responded to National Post’s requests for interviews. Family members have not issued detailed medical updates, and so the exact state of Gebala’s progress is not publicly known. Videos and photos suggest that Gebala remains bound to a wheelchair and nonverbal.

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While social media posts suggest her progress has been gradual, each update appears to signal notable improvement. Posts from each of Gebala’s parents are met with a deluge of well wishes, heart emojis and words of encouragement from social media users.

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In a recent update posted on Aug. 3 on the GoFundMe page, Krysta Hunt, Edmonds’ cousin, said Maya is now able to communicate “no” with a head shake, and a “yes” with a wink.

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“She has started water therapy to regain muscle strength,” Hunt said. “And she is doing standing therapy to regain her core strength.”

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That marks an extraordinary improvement in a few short months. Nine days after her initial hospitalization in February, Maya was hit with a range of infections and other maladies, including meningitis in her brain, severe swelling and “cerebral fluid leak,” according to an update Edmonds posted on March 24.

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Maya underwent two brain surgeries after the ninth day, which she eventually recovered from.

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“She started making faces, the odd smirk, the odd stink eye, and the faces you know that mean hurt,” Edmonds wrote about Maya’s recovery after the second operation. “She would lock eye contact and mouth ‘ow.’ Her hips and her back from laying around… I hate that she is so sore.”

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However, her recovery took a turn for the worse about a month later, when an infection in her brain formed a lump that swelled to “the size of (a) robin’s egg,” according to Edmonds, and later to a “tennis ball.”

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Surgeons conducted two more surgeries on Maya, leaving Edmonds in a state of profound anxiety over whether she would recover.

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“My heart feels like it’s a shriveled raisin, barely beating, and just waiting, waiting,” she said. “I find her in my dreams. She is by a lake, and she is also waiting.”

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By early May, Maya was recovering from her fifth surgery. Well wishes continued to pour in for Maya, and in April Dana White, the founder of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), offered to cover the costs of Maya’s treatment and the family’s accommodation in Los Angeles. The family accepted the offer, but have yet to move her out of Vancouver due to complications in the patient transfer process.

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On June 15, Edmonds posted that Maya was allowed to leave the BC Children’s Hospital for the first time, saying that their day trip to a Vancouver botanical garden let her daughter “experience life again.”

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The same day, Maya’s father David posted a video on X showing her pressing the hospital’s elevator button after he prompted her to do so.

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“Mornings are my favorite with Maya,” he wrote. “She’s wide awake, bright-eyed, and so wonderfully responsive. I’m still in awe of how much she’s improved over the past few months, especially just this week alone. I love you so much, my sweet baby girl.”

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In the days just following the shooting, reports said that Maya had tried to lock the door of the room she and her classmates were in to keep the gunman outside.

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Edmonds corrected that version of events in late March, however, saying that the initial story was told just following the initial chaos of the violence, and therefore didn’t have all of the proper facts and context.

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Instead, according to Edmonds’ description of events, she said Mark Deely, a teacher in a classroom near Maya, had locked the door to keep the children safe, even though his own son Finn was still outside.

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“Once he recognized the loud jarring sound of gunshots, he was forced to make an impossible decision,” Edmonds wrote. “His own son was in the washroom. He made the choice to lock the classroom door, locking his son out, to save the children inside.”

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After the shots stopped, Deely went out of the room and found a severely wounded Kylie May Smith, who died that day. He brought her back into the room, and Finn later also returned safely, locking the door behind him.

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Down the hall, Maya was in the library, where she and others were shot. Edmonds said one of Maya’s classmates, Christina Walker, had been sitting near Maya and Abel Mwansa. Maya and Mwansa were both shot, and Walker was able to drag both of them under a desk to keep them protected. Mwansa died from his wounds; his parents later buried him in his birthplace of Zambia.

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Once the police arrived, a close friend to Maya named “Abbison,” according to her account, quickly told one of the officers to take Maya away, as he had seen her finger twitch and knew she was still alive. The officer, according to Edmonds, promptly put Maya in the back of his police cruiser and drove her to the hospital, likely saving her life.

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“Those are forever heroes,” she said of the people who helped Maya.

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A few weeks after the violence, The Wall Street Journal reported that Van Rootselaar had used a chatbot made by OpenAI, a U.S. tech giant, months before carrying out the shooting. The report found that company employees had allegedly flagged violent conversations that Van Rootselaar was having with the chatbot, including ones that described hypothetical mass shooting events in great detail.

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In late April, National Post reported that seven families of those killed or injured in Tumbler Ridge, including Maya’s, had filed a lawsuit against the company for its alleged failure to adequately respond to those conversations.

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Slowly, the town of Tumbler Ridge appears to be returning to normal. Starting last month, work crews began tearing down the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, as the community prepares to build a new school in a different location. Students in the town have been attending classes in temporary structures, where they will continue to attend for the upcoming school year until the new building is complete.

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For Maya, day-to-day life is anything but normal, however. Edmonds, in her Facebook update in late March, said she considers Maya a hero for the way her daughter has continued to fight through her debilitating injuries, despite the odds. People around the world have “truly held her up in prayer,” Edmonds said.

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“Maya has defied every expectation in every way,” she wrote at the time. “Seeing, breathing, moving limbs, responding — even just being alive. The doctors and nurses here call her a true miracle.”

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