A 38-year-old woman from Alice who vanished during what was supposed to be a work trip to San Antonio has been found safe in Buda, nearly a week after her car, phone, and personal belongings turned up abandoned outside a rural church in Guadalupe County. Buda police located Aryssa Leann Torres around 4:15 p.m. Friday and arranged for her to receive supportive care, closing out a search that stretched across three Central Texas counties.
Torres was reported missing by family members who told investigators they last knew her whereabouts on Friday, August 7, when she was supposed to be attending a continuing education conference in San Antonio, according to KWED Radio AM 1580. Relatives said daily phone contact with her was routine, which made her sudden silence alarming enough to alert law enforcement. As reported by WOAI, Torres was last seen the evening of September 8 near the intersection of Curry Road and O'Daniel Road in southern Guadalupe County, wearing a blue shirt and black shorts, and had told people she planned to return to a nearby Airbnb.
Guadalupe County Sheriff's deputies had already made contact with Torres once before she disappeared. During a welfare check on August 8, deputies gave her a Gatorade and let her continue on her way after she told them she was training for a marathon, a statement that initially led officers to determine she did not need emergency intervention, per the WOAI report.
Security Footage Placed Her at a Seguin School
That assessment shifted as new evidence emerged. Guadalupe County Sheriff's Office investigators later confirmed through school staff that Torres had been captured on security camera footage at Vogel Elementary School on FM 725 in southern Seguin around midday on Monday, two days after deputies had already checked on her. The discovery placed her still in the Seguin area well after her initial contact with law enforcement.
Then, on August 13, investigators found Torres' vehicle, cell phone, and personal belongings abandoned at Amazing Grace Baptist Church on Texas 123 in Seguin. The sheriff's office reported there were no signs of foul play or a struggle at the scene, but handwritten notes recovered with her belongings suggested she may have been experiencing a mental health crisis, shifting the tone and urgency of the search considerably.
Photos distributed publicly during the search, including images of Torres, were still images pulled directly from deputies' body-worn cameras during that initial August 8 encounter. Investigators described her as 5 feet 2 inches tall and about 118 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes and a mole on her back. She was also known to carry a gold Texas A&M Aggie ring engraved with the year 2010 and may have been wearing a gold necklace with a rhinestone pendant.
A Search That Crossed Three Counties
Torres' home in Alice, a South Texas city in Jim Wells County near Kingsville, sits more than 130 miles south of Seguin, according to the Guadalupe Appraisal District. Buda, where she was ultimately found safe, is roughly 40 miles northwest of Seguin in Hays County, connected by Interstate 35 and Highway 130, per the Texas Home Talk travel corridor breakdown. The distances underscore just how far Torres traveled between her scheduled conference stop, the rural welfare check, and the location where she was ultimately located.
Cases like this one illustrate the criteria Texas uses for its most urgent missing-person alerts. The state's CLEAR Alert system, enacted in 2019 under House Bill 1761, allows law enforcement to broadcast statewide emergency bulletins for missing adults between 18 and 64 who are determined to be in imminent danger or facing involuntary disappearance, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. CLEAR stands for Coordinated Law Enforcement Adult Rescue.
Missing Adult Cases Are a Small but Steady Slice of Local Files
Missing adult reports represent a smaller portion of overall missing person files in Guadalupe County compared to juvenile cases, but they are far from rare. Local law enforcement submitted 51 missing adult entries in 2023 and 42 in 2024 into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, per Texas Department of Public Safety statistics. Statewide, Texas agencies entered 12,080 missing adult reports into national databases in 2025 out of 40,309 total missing person cases, with adults accounting for roughly 30 percent of all reports, according to the Texas Center for the Missing.
For families navigating a mental health crisis like the one suggested by Torres' handwritten notes, regional resources do exist. Bluebonnet Trails Community Services serves as the Local Mental Health Authority for Guadalupe County, operating 24-hour crisis intervention resources and a specialized diversion facility in Seguin, and it collaborates with local courts and law enforcement on crisis intervention efforts, according to a report referenced by the Seguin Gazette. The Guadalupe County Sheriff's Office can be reached at 830-379-1224.
