A 40-year-old woman went missing Sunday morning after she was seen walking away from her home in the 700 block of Park Knoll Lane in Katy, heading north toward Cimarron Parkway at around 8:15 a.m. She was last seen wearing a dark long-sleeve top and black-and-white striped pants, and as of the initial bulletins, investigators had not released her name.
Harris County Precinct 5 Constable Terry Allbritton’s office asked the public for help locating the woman, according to Click2Houston, which first reported the disappearance. Anyone with information about her whereabouts is asked to call Precinct 5 dispatch at 281-463-6666 immediately. The exact street and direction of travel were detailed by the Texan Report, which noted that Park Knoll Lane intersects Cimarron Parkway inside Katy’s Memorial Parkway subdivision.
A Sprawling Jurisdiction Depends on Local Tips
The neighborhood where she was last seen sits off South Mason Road and was built primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s, an established area of single-family homes, community parks, and pedestrian sidewalks, per real estate data from HAR.com. That residential layout, with its network of walkable streets feeding into Cimarron Parkway, is now part of the search area deputies are working to cover.
Precinct 5 is no small operation. The constable’s office is the second-largest of its kind in the United States, covering more than 300 square miles of western Harris County and serving over one million residents in communities including Katy, Cy-Fair, and West Houston, according to the same report from the Texan Report. Constable Terry Allbritton took office after winning election in November 2024, leading an office of nearly 500 deputies and civilian staff with an operational budget topping $49 million, as reported by Houston Landing. Given that scale, community tips called into dispatch play an outsized role in narrowing down where searchers should focus.
What Texas Law Requires — and What It Doesn’t
Texas law does not allow police to sit on a missing person report. Under Article 63.009 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, agencies must begin investigating with due diligence and enter identifying information into state and national crime databases within two hours of a report, with no waiting period permitted, according to FindLaw. That standard applies regardless of whether the missing person is an adult or a child.
Still, not every missing adult case triggers a statewide CLEAR Alert, the broadcast system Texas created in 2019 to flag missing adults ages 18 to 64, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. That tool is reserved for cases where investigators determine the person is in imminent danger or that the disappearance was involuntary. Data reported by Click2Houston in 2022 showed DPS received 65 CLEAR Alert requests in a single year statewide and issued alerts in roughly 50 of those cases after confirming the danger threshold was met, illustrating how selectively the alert is used relative to the volume of missing person reports filed each year.
One Case Among Thousands Statewide
The Katy woman’s disappearance adds to a large pool of open cases across Texas. State DPS statistics show law enforcement agencies entered 12,919 adult missing person cases into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database in 2024, out of 44,783 total missing person entries statewide. Regionally, the Texas Center for the Missing found that of 40,309 total missing person reports filed across Texas in 2025, nearly 8,000 originated within the 14-county Houston-Galveston area.
An analysis of statewide missing person trends published this month found that most active adult cases stem from complex circumstances such as mental health struggles, domestic disputes, or disappearances that remain unexplained, though no such cause has been attributed to this case. Investigators have not said what they believe happened to the Katy woman, and her identity had not been publicly released as of the initial reports.
Anyone with information on her location is urged to contact Precinct 5 dispatch right away.
