Body of missing New York grandmother found in Las Vegas drainage ditch

Alisa Goods left a friend's apartment on August 8th to catch a bus to CVS. She was sixty-three, a grandmother from New York visiting Las Vegas. She never came back. Two days later, when her family filed a missing person report, they began receiving messages from her phone—requests for bitcoin, pleas for help, demands for gas money. The messages seemed to suggest the worst: that she had been taken, that someone was using her phone to extort her family. For more than a week, they searched. They called hospitals. They contacted jails. They reached out to the coroner's office. Nothing. Then, early Thursday morning just before two o'clock, Las Vegas police received a call about a body found in a drainage ditch near Harry Reid International Airport. It was Alisa Goods.

The discovery came after surveillance footage from the airport revealed what had actually happened on that August morning. The video showed Goods falling down an embankment, managing to get back to her feet, then collapsing again. After that final fall, there was no further movement. Her body lay in a location invisible from the street—a place where no one passing by would have seen her.

Goods had visited Las Vegas before and was comfortable using public transportation to get around the city. But this trip was different. She had undergone several surgeries that made walking difficult, and she was navigating a desert city where temperatures soar well above one hundred degrees. Her daughter, Kristen Goods, later reflected on the cruel arithmetic of that day: extreme heat, limited mobility, a fall down an embankment, and a location no one could see from the road.

The suspicious messages from her phone had sent the family down a different path entirely. Her niece, Alana Calloway, noted that one request—for gas money—made no sense. Alisa didn't drive. That detail alone had convinced them something sinister had occurred, that kidnapping was the explanation. The family had traveled to Las Vegas themselves, desperate for answers, bracing for the worst. Kristen Goods had told reporters earlier in the week that her heart couldn't bear what she feared might be true.

The Clark County coroner's office has not yet released a cause of death. Police have not explained how her phone came to send those messages, or whether anyone else was involved in her disappearance. What remains is the fact of her body in that ditch, the surveillance video of her fall, and the week of uncertainty that preceded her discovery.

On Friday, Goods' family released a statement through a GoFundMe page. They described her as deeply loved, someone whose absence would leave a permanent void. They spoke of celebrating her life, the people she loved, the memories she left behind. They are navigating their loss together, they said, doing their best in the aftermath of a grandmother who went out for a bus ride and never returned home.