Alisa Goods, the 63 year old New York grandmother who disappeared during a Las Vegas vacation, has been found dead, her family confirmed Friday.
Her body was found early Thursday near Terminal 1 at Harry Reid International Airport. Officers responded to the area around 1:45 a.m. after a body was discovered. Investigators have since located surveillance video from August 8, the day she vanished, showing a woman believed to be Goods near the airport that afternoon.
Nobody has explained how she got there. The cause and manner of her death have not been released, and the investigation is ongoing.
Her niece, Alana Calloway, said in a statement Friday that the family’s hearts are broken, that they were notified her aunt had been found but not the way they wanted, and that words cannot describe what they are going through.
Goods, a grandmother of five from the Upper East Side, had traveled to Las Vegas to visit a longtime friend, Roger John, whom she had known for nine years and stayed with on previous trips. On the afternoon of Saturday, August 8, she left his apartment to walk to a CVS on Paradise Road near Harmon Avenue to pick up iron pills and a few supplies. She was last seen around 1:40 p.m. She never came back.
John notified her family that evening, and a missing person report was filed on August 10. Police have cleared him, and her family has said publicly that they do not consider him a threat and that there is nothing to investigate regarding what he knew.
The detail that made this case travel came a few days later. Someone began responding from Goods’ phone, texting her family, asking for help, for gas money, and eventually for Bitcoin. Calloway said she knew immediately that it was not her aunt. Goods does not drive, which made a request for gas money nonsensical. Calloway tried to force the person onto a phone call by telling them there was an emergency, and they kept avoiding it.
The family did not wait. Kristen Goods, her daughter, flew in from New Jersey. Relatives came from New York. They put up flyers across the city, checked hospitals, and checked morgues. Black and Missing Inc. circulated her photo.
They also said, repeatedly and publicly, that they were not getting help. Calloway said a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police detective told her that her aunt was not a priority, and doubled down on that when the family pushed back. The family said the report took two days to be filed and another four days to reach a detective. Kristen said she was frustrated that a city with as many cameras as Las Vegas had produced so little.
Las Vegas Metro has not released additional information.
