Alisa Goods, a 63-year-old New York City grandmother who vanished during a Las Vegas visit on August 8, was found dead twelve days later in a drainage ditch near Harry Reid International Airport, her body hidden from view the entire time.
Las Vegas Metro Police located Goods' remains at approximately 1:45 a.m. on August 20 in a ditch near Wayne Newton Boulevard and the Terminal 1 parking garage at Harry Reid International Airport, the New York Post reported. Her body was not visible from the street. Surveillance footage showed Goods falling down an embankment, getting back up, and then collapsing on August 8, with no further movement observed after that.
The mother of five and Upper East Side resident had been visiting a longtime friend near the Las Vegas Strip when she left his apartment to take a bus to a nearby CVS to buy iron pills. She never came back. For nearly two weeks, her family, her friend, and police searched for her, while mysterious text messages sent from her phone deepened the confusion.
Goods had been staying with Roger John, a friend of twenty years who lives near the Las Vegas Strip. On August 8, she headed out to a CVS. John's account of that final goodbye was plain.
"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."
That quote, attributed to John by Fox News, captures how ordinary the moment seemed. A grandmother walking to a drugstore in the desert heat. Nothing alarming. Nothing unusual, except that Goods had recently undergone several surgical procedures on her legs, a detail that raises obvious questions about her physical condition that day.
John aided in the search effort over the following days. Las Vegas Metro Police confirmed he was not considered a suspect in her disappearance.
The discovery of her body in a drainage ditch, near one of the busiest airports in the country, yet invisible from street level, is a grim reminder of how quickly a person can vanish in an urban landscape. Goods' family had been publicly pleading for help throughout the search, and the outcome they feared most arrived on August 20.
Four days after Goods disappeared, on August 12, text messages were sent from her phone. They asked for gas money and Bitcoin. Her niece Alana Calloway immediately recognized something was wrong.
"I said, What do you need gas for? The car? My aunt does not drive. There is no car."
Calloway's words, reported by Breitbart, cut to the heart of the deception. Goods did not drive. She did not own a car in Las Vegas. The requests for Bitcoin, a currency most 63-year-old grandmothers are not casually soliciting, made even less sense. Police believe those texts were sent by unrelated "bad actors" who found her phone, not by Goods herself.
That detail adds a disturbing layer to an already painful story. Someone found a missing woman's phone and, rather than turning it in, used it to try to extract money from her worried family. Police have ruled out foul play in Goods' death, but the exploitation of her phone by strangers while her family was desperate for any sign of her is its own kind of cruelty.
Las Vegas Metro Police told local outlet KTNV that surveillance cameras recorded Goods on the day she vanished. The footage showed her falling down an embankment, managing to get back up, and then collapsing. No further movement was observed after that point.
Authorities have not yet announced a cause of death. The footage, combined with the fact that Goods had recently had multiple leg surgeries, suggests a medical event may have played a role, but that remains unconfirmed. Cases of missing people found dead in hard-to-reach locations often hinge on small physical misfortunes, a stumble, a wrong turn, a medical episode, that become fatal when no one is nearby to help.
The embankment where Goods fell sits near one of the most heavily trafficked corridors in Las Vegas, steps from an international airport terminal. Yet her body lay there for twelve days without being spotted. Police noted the remains were not visible from the street, a fact that explains the delay but does not make it less haunting for a family that spent those twelve days searching and hoping.
Calloway, speaking for the family, did not hold back her grief after learning her aunt had been found dead.
"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.
"This is an unimaginable time. Words cannot describe the pain our family is experiencing right now."
Calloway thanked the public and the media for the attention given to the case and asked for privacy as the family grieves. She also noted that the family is still trying to learn the details surrounding Goods' death, a sign that key questions, including the official cause, remain unanswered even for those closest to her.
Goods was described by her family as their matriarch. A 63-year-old mother of five who lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, she had traveled to Las Vegas to visit a longtime friend. Disappearances that end in tragedy leave families with a particular kind of anguish, the days of not knowing, followed by the worst possible answer.
Police have ruled out foul play, but several questions linger. No cause of death has been released. Whether Goods' recent leg surgeries contributed to her collapse is unknown. The exact sequence of events between her leaving John's apartment and ending up near the airport drainage ditch has not been publicly detailed.
The identity of whoever sent those fraudulent texts from her phone on August 12 also remains unresolved. Police attributed the messages to "bad actors" who found the device, but no arrests related to those texts have been reported. Missing-persons cases often leave families waiting months or longer for full answers, even after a body is recovered.
For now, the Goods family knows only that their matriarch left a friend's home to buy iron pills on a hot August day in Las Vegas, collapsed near an airport embankment, and lay there unseen for nearly two weeks while strangers used her phone to beg for Bitcoin.
A woman who raised five children and held a family together deserved better than that. So does every family left waiting by a system that sometimes finds answers too late to matter.
