Ms. Favel said Tina was a happy girl who showed promise. She liked math and dancing, and television crime shows. She aspired to be a social worker.

But at 12, the girl’s father, who only had four months to live, was beaten to death in an argument with two men over $60.

Despairing, she began to skip school, smoke pot and cut herself. She got a tattoo with two angel wings and her father’s name on her back. When asked to write a victim’s impact statement during the trial of her father’s killers, she fell apart.

“She kept crumpling the paper and said she couldn’t do it,” recalled Ms. Favel, on whose living room wall hangs a painting of Tina, waifish with big brown eyes.

In June 2014, Tina left Ms. Favel’s home and went to Winnipeg, about 75 miles away, to visit her mother. Ms. Favel gave her $50 and a prepaid phone card, telling her to call if she wanted to come home. The call never came.

Instead, she said, the girl texted photographs of herself with a black eye to her sister, saying that their mother, who was working in the sex trade, had beaten her. Alarmed, Ms. Favel said she reached out to three Manitoba family services agencies, which bickered over who was responsible.

Eventually, Tina was placed by child and family services in a series of local motels, from which she ran away. She began living on the streets in Winnipeg’s impoverished north end.