A Brooklyn woman’s family is growing more concerned by the day after she vanished while visiting a friend in Las Vegas — and suspect someone else is using her phone to ask the family for money.
Alisa Goods, 63, was reported missing earlier this month after leaving the friend’s apartment Aug. 8 to go to a CVS pharmacy just off the Las Vegas Strip.
“This is not like her to just go missing,” her niece, Alana Calloway, told Fox 8.
“She has a family that loves her, cares about her. We want her home and want her home safe and alive.”
The concerned family, who hail from New York and New Jersey, said she was staying with her friend, Roger John, whom she usually stays with when she visits Sin City.
John told the outlet that this was Goods’ second visit this year, and said he’s known her for nine years.
“It’s just sad because she’s the nicest person you would meet,” John said of his missing friend.
He said the last time he saw her was when she left his apartment to catch a bus around 12:45 p.m., and that he left a short time later and returned after two or three hours to find she still wasn’t back.
“And I was like, ‘She should have been home already.’ I didn’t think much of it, because sometimes she’d go out and she’d shop, she stays out. And I kept texting and calling and texting and calling,” John said.
He and Goods’ family both said her cell phone had been disconnected and wasn’t working — until Aug. 12, two days after she was reported missing, when it started firing off text messages to the family.
“I said, ‘Hey, could you call me back? Something happened to mommy. It’s an emergency.’ And I kind of went on and on trying to get the person to actually call me. But they kept putting it off and saying, ‘Now my card’s not working,’” Calloway told the outlet.
She said the person on the other end claimed to be at a gas station having issues with their credit card, which Calloway immediately found suspicious as Goods did not have a car on her trip.
Calloway kept pressing them, attempting to discern if the person they were exchanging messages with was actually Goods.
“I said, ‘Well, okay, I can send you money for gas. How much do you want me to send you?’” Calloway said. “Then they wanted the bitcoin. And then I said, ‘Well, hold on. Let me get Kelly to help.’ We have nobody in our family named Kelly.”
She said she believes Goods would have asked who Kelly was had it been her on the other end of the phone.
“That was alarming,” Calloway recounted. “Every time the person texts back, it just felt like my heart was in my stomach because I knew it wasn’t my aunt.”
A short time later, Goods’ son, Keven Newton, also started getting strange texts seeking cash.
Calloway said the Las Vegas Metro Police told her Goods “did not meet the qualifications of a priority” because she didn’t have a disability.
Now that she’s been missing for a week, the family is fearing the worst, reaching out to hospitals, the coroner’s office and even local jails in a desperate bid to locate her.
“This is our plea and our cry: if anybody has seen anything, it can be the smallest thing. It can be something that they think does not matter; we ask that you just report it,” Calloway said.
“Just give my mother back. I don’t know what y’all got going on, but this ain’t it,” Newton said.
John said the whole experience has been surreal.
“It’s just really weird to me. It just feels like it’s not happening. I see this all the time and you never really think this could happen to me,” said John, who has started putting up missing person flyers around the area she disappeared.
“And now it’s happened to me and it’s just so strange.”
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