A 63-year-old Brooklyn grandmother who disappeared during a Las Vegas visit was found dead in a drainage ditch near Harry Reid International Airport, and her family still has no official cause of death.
Alisa Goods left a friend's apartment on the afternoon of August 8 to catch a bus to a nearby CVS pharmacy for iron pills. She never came back. Two days later, her family reported her missing. Her body was discovered near the Terminal 1 parking garage along Wayne Newton Boulevard, a location police say could not be seen from the street.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police reviewed surveillance footage from the airport area that day. It showed a woman, believed to be Goods, falling down an embankment, getting back up, and then collapsing. Police told the U.S. Sun that no further movement was observed after that point.
The Las Vegas coroner's office has not released an official cause of death. Police have apparently ruled out foul play, though that characterization has not been confirmed through a formal public statement. For Goods' family, the weeks since her disappearance have brought grief and a string of unanswered questions that local authorities have done little to resolve publicly.
She walked out for a routine errand and never returned
Goods had been staying with Roger John, a longtime friend, at his apartment near the University of Nevada campus, a few miles east of the Las Vegas Strip. John told KLAS-TV that she headed out that afternoon for what seemed like an ordinary trip.
"Last I saw her, she was going down the stairs. And I said, 'OK, see you later.' And that's the last time I saw her."
John said he was not immediately alarmed. Goods had a habit of spending hours shopping. But when she did not return and did not answer calls or texts, he contacted her family.
Her body was found near Terminal 1 at Harry Reid International Airport around 1:45 a.m. on a Thursday, after someone called police to report a deceased woman in a drainage ditch area. How Goods ended up at the airport, miles from the CVS she had set out for, remains unexplained. Cases like the recovery of a missing 24-year-old's body in Indiana earlier this year show how quickly routine outings can turn fatal under circumstances no one anticipates.
Mysterious texts asked for gas money and Bitcoin
Four days after Goods vanished, two family members began receiving text messages from her phone. The messages asked for gas money and Bitcoin, requests that made no sense to anyone who knew her.
Goods' niece, Alana Calloway, told 8NewsNow about one of the exchanges:
"I said, 'What do you need gas for? The car?' My aunt does not drive. There is no car."
The texts suggested someone else had possession of Goods' phone. Police dismissed whoever was using it, calling them "bad actors" not connected to her status as a missing person. That explanation has not satisfied the family. How the phone ended up in a stranger's hands, and whether police investigated the individuals behind the messages, remains unclear.
The pattern is unsettling. Across the country, families dealing with missing loved ones have faced similar agonies. In North Carolina, a missing woman was found dead in the woods before a registered sex offender was charged. In New Mexico, the remains of a missing Los Alamos worker were recovered under circumstances that left her family shattered. Each case underscores how little comfort families receive when answers come slowly, or not at all.
Calloway's family left with grief and no answers
Calloway provided a statement to KTNV after learning her aunt's body had been found:
"Our hearts are broken. We were notified that my aunt was found, unfortunately, not the way we wanted her to be."
She described the loss as "unimaginable" and said words could not capture the family's pain. Goods was a grandmother from Brooklyn. She had traveled to Las Vegas to visit a friend, not to disappear into an airport drainage ditch with no explanation.
The surveillance footage raises as many questions as it answers. Police say the video shows a woman falling, rising, and collapsing on August 8, the same day Goods left John's apartment. But the footage has not been released publicly. The caller who reported the body has not been publicly identified. And the coroner's office has offered no timeline for releasing a cause of death.
In South Carolina, a body matching a missing trainer's description was found under similarly murky conditions, prompting state investigators to step in. In Arizona, a woman found dead near Lake Pleasant after a social media meetup led to a first-degree murder charge. Whether Goods' case warrants that level of scrutiny is a question Las Vegas police have not publicly addressed.
Police say no foul play, but the file is far from closed
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police have apparently ruled out foul play. They have pointed to the surveillance footage as the basis for that conclusion, noting the video shows the woman collapsing without any visible involvement from another person. The location, tucked away from the street near the airport's Terminal 1 garage, meant nobody could see her from passing traffic.
But "apparently ruled out" is not the same as a formal finding. The coroner has not spoken. The cause of death is unknown. The phone ended up in someone else's hands. And a 63-year-old woman who set out for a drugstore somehow wound up in a drainage ditch beside an airport parking garage.
Families deserve more than dismissive shorthand about "bad actors" and surveillance clips described but never shown. Alisa Goods was a grandmother who went out for iron pills. The least her family is owed is a complete, transparent account of how she died, and why it took so long to find her.
