‘Bravest person I know’: Father’s pride as school shooting victim leaves hospital after 262 days
By Lex Harvey, CNN
(CNN) — A 13-year-old girl who was critically wounded in the deadly February school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, has been released from hospital after 262 days, her father said Thursday.
“There was never a day I stopped believing we would get here. The road ahead is still long, but this is a milestone no one thought we would reach,” David Gebala wrote in an emotional social media post addressed to his daughter Maya, calling her “the bravest person I know.”
Maya was among more than two dozen people wounded in the mass shooting at a secondary school in the small mining town in northern British Columbia, which left eight people dead, including six children, in the country’s deadliest school shooting in decades.
She was shot three times and airlifted to British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, where doctors initially told her family she was unlikely to make it through the night, according to Gebala.
“You refused to accept the words we heard 262 days ago when you came out of the OR. Look at you, my girl. You blew every expectation out of the water,” Gebala wrote in the post to Facebook, which included a video of Maya smiling in her wheelchair.
Since February, Maya has undergone five surgeries, including receiving a prosthetic skull, Gebala said in the post, which listed challenging and hopeful milestones over the past 262 days.
“251 days ago, you opened your eye, moved it, and shifted your leg only to be rushed back for emergency surgery that morning,” he wrote. “179 days ago, your prosthetic skull was placed. Your fifth surgery, and the one that finally stuck.”
“145 days ago, you smiled for the first time (intentionally) while we played thumb war,” Gebala went on. “61 days ago, I heard your voice again.”
“Now it’s time to leave these hospital walls behind and keep moving forward, Maya Bear,” Gebala wrote, thanking the nurses, doctors and therapists “who walked every step of this with us.”
Gebala has frequently offered updates on Maya’s long recovery in posts to Facebook, including a recent excursion to see the rock band Foo Fighters and celebrate her 13th birthday.
Maya, who was in the school library when the massacre unfolded on February 10, was shot three times, including in the head, which shattered parts of her skull and left her with catastrophic brain injuries, according to a criminal complaint filed by her family against OpenAI.
The lawsuit, filed by Maya’s mother Cia Edmonds on her behalf, is one of dozens filed against OpenAI in both US and Canadian courts on behalf of victims, survivors and witnesses accusing the tech company of negligence after it emerged that the shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, had used ChatGPT to plan the attack. The province of British Columbia is also suing OpenAI.
OpenAI has pushed back against claims that it does not take safety seriously. In response to the lawsuits from the victims’ families, a company spokesperson told CNN in April that it has a “zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence.” The company has said it deactivated an original account created by the shooter in June 2025 for violent activities, but Van Rootselaar made a second account to keep using the chatbot.
The company’s CEO Sam Altman has previously apologized to the community of Tumbler Ridge for failing to notify authorities to the shooter’s disturbing online conversations with the AI chatbot even after staff flagged the account internally.
Earlier this month, US authorities arrested a 30-year-old from Washington state who allegedly offered advice and sent money to Van Rootselaar ahead of the shooting.
CNN previously reported Van Rootselaar posted about guns and hunting and her apparent mental health struggles online in the lead-up to the massacre.
The-CNN-Wire
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