A 63-year-old New York grandmother who vanished after stepping out to buy iron pills at a Las Vegas CVS was found dead 12 days later in a drainage ditch near the airport, her body hidden from view the entire time.
Alisa Goods, a mother of five from New York City's Upper East Side, left the apartment of her longtime friend Roger John near the Las Vegas Strip on August 8 to catch a bus to a nearby pharmacy. She never came back. Surveillance footage reviewed by Las Vegas Metro Police showed a woman believed to be Goods falling down an embankment near Harry Reid International Airport, getting back up, and then collapsing, with no further movement, the New York Post reported.
Her body lay in that spot, a drainage ditch near Wayne Newton Boulevard and the Terminal 1 parking garage, for 12 days. Police said the location was not visible from the street. An unnamed homeless man eventually found her remains and alerted parking attendants, who contacted authorities.
John, who had known Goods for 20 years, told reporters she left his apartment to buy iron pills at CVS. He described a routine departure, nothing alarming, nothing unusual.
Fox News reported John's account of the moment:
"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."
Goods had recently undergone several surgical procedures on her legs that made getting around difficult. Whether those procedures played any role in her fall and collapse remains unknown. Metro Police have not released her cause of death.
Her daughter Kristen flew in from New Jersey to help search. Family members checked hospitals and morgues across the Las Vegas area, looking for any trace of the missing grandmother.
While the family searched, Goods' disconnected cell phone began sending messages to relatives. Some of those messages requested money, including gas money and Bitcoin. The requests raised immediate alarm.
Goods' niece Alana Calloway told reporters the texts made no sense. Breitbart reported Calloway's reaction to the gas-money request:
"I said, What do you need gas for? The car? My aunt does not drive. There is no car."
The texts arrived on August 12, four days after Goods disappeared. Police attributed the messages not to Goods but to unrelated "bad actors" who apparently found her phone. Whether authorities have identified or pursued those individuals remains an open question.
The phone activity initially fueled fears of a possible kidnapping. But Metro Police ruled out foul play, pointing to the surveillance footage of Goods' solitary collapse on August 8 as the key evidence.
The timeline raises hard questions about how a woman's body could remain undiscovered for nearly two weeks in the immediate vicinity of one of the country's busiest airports. Harry Reid International Airport serves millions of travelers. Wayne Newton Boulevard runs alongside it. The Terminal 1 parking garage sits nearby.
Yet police said the embankment where Goods collapsed put her out of sight from the street. It took a homeless man, not a search party, not airport security, not law enforcement, to find her.
After the discovery, Calloway issued a statement on behalf of the family:
"Our hearts are broken. We were notified that my aunt was found, unfortunately, not the way we wanted her to be."
She continued:
"We just want to thank the public for the outpouring of love, support, and prayers. We also want to thank the media for helping bring attention to this situation. This hurts so deeply. We are still trying to learn the details surrounding her death. We ask for continued prayers and privacy as we grieve."
Authorities have still not released Goods' official cause of death. Whether her recent leg surgeries contributed to the fall, whether the people who sent Bitcoin requests from her phone have been identified, and whether any formal investigation into those messages continues, none of it has been publicly answered.
Goods was 63 years old. She had five children. She was visiting a friend she had known for two decades. She walked out the door to buy pills at a drugstore. And she died alone in a ditch near an airport, unseen for 12 days, while strangers used her phone to ask her family for cryptocurrency.
The people who loved Alisa Goods did everything right, they searched, they called hospitals, they went to the press. The system around her did not return the favor.
