Officials set new traps to test DNA against last year’s attack
Selah Reed’s family first knew something was wrong when the 20-year-old missed a routine Saturday night call with her sister. By the next morning, no one had heard from Reed or her mother, Jennifer Balcarras, and relatives asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to check on their home in Bella Coola on British Columbia’s central coast. Balcarras’ car was gone and the doors were locked, according to the family’s account. The car turned up at a trailhead up the road, but the two women were nowhere to be found.
Family members across Canada and the U.S. began mobilizing, said Matt Balcarras, Jenny Balcarras’ brother. He headed north from Vancouver Island while his brother left from Calgary. The brothers met and drove through the night, and late Monday they received a call saying their sister had been killed, likely by a grizzly.
When they reached the trailhead Tuesday morning, ready to join the search for Reed, her remains had also been found. The search had become a recovery effort.
The killings occurred only 3 to 4 kilometers (1.8 to 2.4 miles) from the spot where a grizzly attacked a group of schoolchildren and teachers walking a trail on Nov. 20, 2025. Eleven people were injured in that attack, two of them critically.
Jeff Tyre, an inspector with the Conservation Officer Service, said the aggressive bear involved in that attack was never captured, but officials were able to collect its DNA. New traps have been set in hopes of catching the bear involved in last weekend’s attack and learning whether it was the same animal. Officials also do not know whether more than one bear was involved, Tyre said.
Terry Webber, chief administrative officer for the Nuxalk Nation, said the killings were triggering for families traumatized by last year’s attack. “Our community is still healing,” he said, adding that the community has imposed a curfew and is providing mental health services. “Our priority is to ensure they’re safe and ensure our community is supported.”
The delay in finding the two women was complicated by difficult terrain, even though the site was close to the trailhead, and by the grizzly bear’s behavior. Searchers found Jenny Balcarras first, then her daughter, Matt Balcarras said. He said the search was helped by more resources and a cadaver dog.
Searchers found Reed’s remains in a bear cache — a place where bears stash food, sometimes by digging a small hole and covering it with branches and vegetation to keep other animals and birds away. “Even though it was within 100 or so meters (330 feet), locating remains in a cache is difficult,” Matt Balcarras said.
By the time officials located Reed, she could be identified only by her clothing, her uncle said. His sister was in a similar condition, but family members knew who she was thanks to several tiny tattoos, he said. “There’s no obvious body to identify,” he said. “The coroner’s investigation will include DNA and dental work. But there is no doubt that the remains that were found are theirs.”
Grizzly bears are common in the area surrounding the Bella Coola community, officials said. The Conservation Officer Service maintains a hotline where people can report problem bears, but no calls had been received recently, Tyre said during a media briefing.
Balcarras, an art therapist, had moved to Bella Coola during the summer. She had previously lived in Alaska, where her children were born. Matt Balcarras described her as “the central organizing person in our family.” “In classic, strong single-mother style, she scraped together a career and a life for herself and her kids,” he said. She was small in stature but strong in character and physical abilities, he said.
He said Balcarras was comfortable living among wildlife. “She lived in the Bush when her kids were babies,” he said. “She and my niece were not naive or foolish or uninformed. They’ve lived in these areas and have been around animals of countless types for years and years and decades.”