She Looked Exhausted. Then She Tossed Her Bag Over a Vegas Embankment — and Followed It. What Cameras Caught Before a NYC Grandma Was Found Dead
For twelve days, Alisa Goods was a missing person. Then she was a body in a drainage ditch no one could see from the road.
The 63-year-old New York grandmother — a mother of five, grandmother of five, Newark native living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — had come to Las Vegas to visit a longtime friend. On the afternoon of August 8, she left the apartment near Maryland Parkway and Tropicana Avenue to go to a CVS at Paradise Road and Harmon Avenue for iron pills. She never came back. The friend reported her missing two days later.
What happened between the pharmacy and Harry Reid International Airport is the question her family still cannot close.
Las Vegas police later reviewed airport surveillance from that same day. The footage, they said, showed Goods falling down an embankment near Wayne Newton Boulevard and the Terminal 1 parking garage, getting back up, then collapsing. After that, there was no further movement. Her position could not be seen from the street. Twelve days later, in the early hours of August 20, a homeless man walking the area spotted a woman in the ditch, told parking attendants, and police confirmed she was dead. Investigators said they found no evidence at the scene that pointed to an obvious crime. A cause of death has not been released. The Clark County coroner has told the family the autopsy and final report may take six to twelve weeks — possibly into November.
Goods’s daughter, Kristen Goods, has now described what relatives were told the video showed. Her mother appeared to have a look of heat exhaustion. She sat down. She threw the bag she was carrying over the embankment. Then she went over it herself. The family was taken aback. Walking miles alone in extreme August desert heat, Kristen said, was out of character. Goods had also undergone several surgeries on her legs that made long walks more difficult. Relatives asked to see the footage. The airport said a subpoena is required. Other cameras — including at the pharmacy — have not been released to the family. Police directed them to the businesses that own the recordings; those businesses said they release video only to law enforcement.
Another thread still does not line up with a simple collapse. Days after Goods vanished, messages came from her phone. Relatives were asked for money after an alleged credit-card problem at a gas station — even though she had not rented a car. Then the requests turned to Bitcoin. When a niece mentioned a family name that did not exist, the person on the other end did not catch the test. A later call came from a woman’s voice the family did not recognize. Police have suggested the texts were likely from someone using or spoofing the phone. Goods was found with a fanny pack. Whether her phone was inside it, and whether it was recovered, has not been publicly confirmed.
How a woman who did not drive traveled from a mid-Strip pharmacy to an airport embankment in peak heat remains unexplained. No official finding yet says she was a crime victim. No official finding yet says she was not. Until the coroner speaks, the cameras show a last sequence: sit down, throw the bag, go over the edge. Everything after that is still silence.
