She Never Boarded the Bus: Camera Captures NYC Grandma’s Last 60 Seconds Before She Vanished Into a Vegas Airport Ditch for 12 Days
A new timeline has redrawn the final hours of Alisa Goods, the 63-year-old New York grandmother found dead in a drainage ditch beside Harry Reid International Airport. For weeks, her family believed she left a CVS near Paradise Road and Harmon Avenue and boarded a bus. Her daughter, Kristen Goods, now says that never happened. After the pharmacy stop on August 8, Goods kept walking — toward the airport, not back to her friend’s apartment east of the Strip.
Goods, a grandmother of five who lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and was born in Newark, was visiting a longtime friend. She left around midday to pick up iron pills. She had recently undergone several leg surgeries and walking was already difficult. August heat in Las Vegas is unforgiving. How she covered the roughly two miles from the pharmacy area to Wayne Newton Boulevard remains one of the unanswered questions. She did not drive and had no car in the city.
Airport Control cameras recorded her at 2:17 p.m. on August 8 at the edge of a drainage ditch about 50 yards east of the Terminal 1 parking garage. According to a police report, she tried to climb the embankment, then fell back down and stayed there. Investigators later described the same sequence as falling, getting back up, and collapsing. After that, no further movement was seen. From the adjacent roadway her position was invisible.
Kristen Goods has said police described her mother as unsteady near a low wall, and that belongings appeared to go over the edge before she did. The family has not independently confirmed every detail of that description and is still seeking access to the full video. Officials have not released a cause or manner of death. Autopsy results can take weeks.
Goods was reported missing two days after she left. While relatives searched hospitals and morgues, messages began arriving from her phone. Some asked for gas money. Others asked for Bitcoin. A call came in from someone claiming to be Alisa. Family members said the voice was not hers. She did not need gas. She had no car. Those messages, arriving days after the camera last showed her motionless in the ditch, have fueled suspicion that her phone left her possession.
On August 20, around 1:45 a.m., a man walking near the Terminal 1 parking structure found her body on the rocks and alerted parking employees. Police were called. Officers found her unresponsive. Paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene. Twelve days had passed since the 2:17 p.m. fall. Investigators have said they found no evidence at the location that pointed to another person being present when she went down the slope.
The friend she was visiting is not considered a suspect. The family still wants to know why she walked toward the airport, what happened between the pharmacy and 2:17 p.m., who used her phone, and what killed her. Until the medical examiner reports and the full video is reviewed by those who knew her gait and habits, the last hour of Alisa Goods remains a short, documented collapse in a place almost no one could see — and a long silence after it.
