By: Travis McGee
Houstonians, Community leaders, and even some elected employees from all over Bayou City are all asking the same questions and all are getting the same answers or the lack of the basic information excluding the names of the victims. The basic demographics of a victim or suspect has never hindered any type of investigation considering they always mention race and sex, either as the suspect or the victim.
It’s easy to tell others not to be alarmed when we can still see and talk to our own love ones. We The People don’t want assumptions, but instead we want basic information in a timely manner. We simply don’t know what’s going on. The closet we have come to a serial killer are characters on tv. We don’t know if they exist or not here in Houston, however nothing should be ruled out. We don’t know what happened to any of the victims due to lack of transparency. Information should be forthcoming before it is demanded. Lack of Transparency
is a huge problem that leads to mistrust as well as speculations. We can’t assume the causes of the death because we simply do not know and hopefully every human body found is treated with dignity and respect by doing a proper investigation vs just another body found.
In 2023- 26 human bodies were found in our area bayous, in 2024 -24 bodies were found and in 2025- 23 bodies were found with 2 months left in the year. In a 3-year span that’s a total of 73 bodies that we know of. This is one body too many and too many bodies without enough answers if any at all.
Everybody is Somebody and not one of these bodies should be treated like” No Body”. Vague or no information leads to speculations, however sometimes speculations and assumptions are one in the same. For example, some speculation arrived that Houston may or may not have a serial killer, on the other hand assumptions were made that suicide, drownings, homelessness, natural causes, etc. played a role in these deaths without all of these instances proving to be true.
Realistically speaking homicide could’ve played a role also. We simply don’t know, so yes there is reason to be alarmed and careful at the same time. The 4th largest city and energy capital of the world just can’t be strong around hurricane season, but we have to be both strong and transparent all the time 365/24/7. In the past and present our bayous have been holding much more than water. We understand that people dump any and everything whether it’s in our neighborhoods or in our bayous from building materials, cars, dead animals, trash, junk, and yes even dead bodies however somethings are priceless like human life. The purpose of our bayous is to hold and move large volumes of water that accumulate in our neighborhoods and on our thoroughfares whether streets or highways after a good rain, storm, or hurricane.
Anything in the bayou that shouldn’t be there is restricting the water flow, so why not dredge the bayous sections at a time on schedule or as needed as routine maintenance, high water preparation, and hurricane preparedness. Since we are also considered the bayou city, we have to be proactive with the daily operations and maintenance or of our 22 bayous. We can use our bayou to train for both search efforts and highwater rescue. We can’t cover all 2,500 miles in a day, but we must start somewhere. The National Guard can be utilized in dredging our bayous along with other state resources and funding. If everybody does something, everything will get done.
Now that the alarmed has been sounded what are we going to do about it?
