Aielah Katherina Saric-Auger was a friendly and trusting 14-year-old girl, the youngest of six children in a close-knit family. A member of the Lheidli T'enneh First Nation, she was known by her mother's nickname for her, "Sweetie Pie." Despite facing hardships, including poverty and periods of separation, Aielah and her siblings shared a strong bond with their mother, Audrey.
In early 2006, the family was living in Prince George, British Columbia, where Aielah was an eighth-grade student at D.P. Todd Secondary School. She was described as a sweet girl who made friends easily, though some felt she was perhaps too trusting of others.
On the evening of Thursday, February 2, 2006, Aielah, her brother Tim, and her sister Kyla went to the Pine Centre Mall to spend the day. Later, Aielah and Kyla met up with friends and made plans to go out, but Tim decided to head home. The sisters eventually separated, and Kyla arrived home early the next morning to find Aielah wasn't there. When Aielah didn't return by that Friday, her mother, Audrey Auger, grew deeply concerned. She tried to report her daughter missing to the local police but was told she had to wait. While waiting, the family began a desperate search, combing the city, contacting everyone they knew, and putting up missing person flyers all over downtown Prince George. The official missing person report was filed four days later, on February 6.
The last known movements of Aielah were pieced together by investigators. After leaving her friends, she had gone to another friend's house late at night to ask for a ride home, not wanting to call her mother. When she couldn't get a ride, she was seen walking. Surveillance footage captured her walking alone after midnight, around 1:00 a.m., passing a Save-On-Foods gas station on 15th Avenue. Her mother later heard that Aielah was last seen getting into a black van, but this lead, like others, never resulted in a suspect.
Eight days after she was last seen, on February 10, 2006, a motorist driving on Highway 16 spotted something in a ditch about 23 kilometers east of Prince George, near the Tabor Mountain ski resort. Police responded and discovered the body of a young female. The only item found with her was a necklace, which Audrey tragically identified as the one she had given her daughter. It was Aielah. An autopsy later confirmed she had died from blunt force trauma to the head. Due to the condition of her remains, her family had to have a closed-casket funeral. A fundraiser started by her school's vice president helped the grieving family with funeral expenses. Aielah was brought to Alberta and laid to rest in Gift Lake with a traditional native burial.
Aielah’s murder is one of a series of unsolved killings and disappearances of women along a 725-kilometer stretch of Highway 16, a desolate road infamously known as the "Highway of Tears." Her case was investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Project E-PANA, a task force created to determine if a serial killer or killers were responsible for the many cases involving mostly Indigenous women and girls along British Columbia's major highways. Investigators questioned dozens of people, including a police officer who had a brief encounter with Aielah that night, but everyone was eventually cleared, and no arrests have ever been made in her case.
In the years following her daughter's death, Audrey Auger became a powerful advocate, channeling her grief into action. She started an annual walk she called the "Highway of Hope" to raise awareness for Aielah and the other missing and murdered women. She once told a reporter, "I buried myself when I buried my daughter." Tragically, Audrey's life was cut short on March 5, 2013, when she was killed in a vehicle collision on the same Highway 16. The annual walk was later revived and continues in honor of both Aielah and her determined mother. Aielah Katherina Saric-Auger's murder remains unsolved, a painful and prominent case among the tragedies of the Highway of Tears.
