Instagram Vacation Influencer Lee MacMillan, 28, Killed by Educate in Noleta

Santa Barbara Police verified that highly followed Instagram individuality and world traveler Lee MacMillan, 28, was strike and killed by a educate last Friday by the intersection of Condition and Hollister streets in Noleta. 

Police experienced issued an warn that week inquiring customers of the public for any information on MacMillan’s disappearance, noting she had left her residence without having automobile, keys, wallet, or cell cell phone. Whilst there was no suicide be aware, law enforcement expressed problem that MacMillan’s dying had been self-inflicted. 

On December 5 very last year, she discussed her struggles with despair, nervousness, and suicidal feelings at some length on an Instagram movie article. In the post, she connected her psychological wellbeing struggles to placing her own requirements previous and these of others initial. 

From the outside, MacMillan’s lifestyle would have appeared one particular of adventure, health, beauty, liberty, and romance. Due to the fact 2016, MacMilllan had been an completed globe trotter, traveling from Canada — where she was born —to the idea of South The usa in a Dodge Sprinter with her then-boyfriend and fellow traveler, Max Bidstrup, and their Australian shepherd, Occy. Collectively they — Max & Lee — loved a pursuing of 495,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel. 

They would announce the parting of their means late in 2019, and in early 2020 MacMillan set out on a Sprinter Tour of Morocco with two other social-media-savvy road warriors. COVID, nevertheless, would bring that trek to an abrupt halt right after a few months, and starting up about six months in the past, MacMillan settled into Santa Barbara. 

In the wake of MacMillan’s demise, friends have expressed shock at her decline although praising her for coming out as a mental health and fitness advocate.