A CLEAR Alert issued for 58-year-old Tony Holden has been cancelled after Houston Police located him safe, ending a search that began when he was last seen on foot near 6500 Cherrydale in southeast Houston. Holden had been wearing a red Texans shirt with white and blue shorts when he disappeared on Sunday.
The alert was issued on behalf of the Houston Police Department by the Texas Center for the Missing, according to a message posted by TX Center 4 Missing
, which operates under the username @txcenter. The nonprofit confirmed early Monday that Holden had been located safe and thanked the public for sharing the alert. HPD had asked anyone with information on Holden's whereabouts to call the department's tip line at 832-394-1840.
How Adult Missing Person Alerts Work in Texas
CLEAR Alerts exist because Texas law otherwise leaves a gap between AMBER Alerts for missing children and Silver Alerts for seniors 65 and older. The Texas Legislature created the Coordinated Law Enforcement Adult Rescue system in 2019 under House Bill 1769 specifically to cover adults who fall outside those two categories, according to reporting from KVUE at the time the law was enacted.
Because adults have a legal right to leave home without notice, police cannot simply broadcast an alert whenever someone goes missing. Under rules set by the Texas Department of Public Safety, a statewide CLEAR Alert can only be requested if investigators preliminarily determine the missing adult is in imminent danger of bodily injury or death, or that the disappearance was involuntary, and the request must be submitted within 72 hours of the person going missing.
A Program Named After Victims Like Cayley Mandadi
The CLEAR Alert program's name honors female victims of violence in Texas, including Cayley Mandadi, a 19-year-old college student whose 2017 death led her mother to push for AMBER Alert-style broadcasts covering missing young adults, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Mandadi's family argued that real-time highway alerts could have made a difference in locating her sooner.
In Southeast Texas, these alerts are coordinated through a partnership between local police departments and the Texas Center for the Missing, a Houston-based nonprofit founded in March 2000 by businesswoman Doreen Wise after the four-month disappearance and death of her 17-year-old son, Gabriel Lester, as Hoodline has previously reported on a canceled Alief alert. The organization now serves as the primary emergency alert administrator across a 14-county region surrounding Houston, coordinating CLEAR, AMBER, Silver, and Endangered Missing Persons alerts.
Houston Carries the Bulk of Texas's Adult Missing Cases
The scale of the challenge facing that regional network is significant. The Texas Center for the Missing recorded 3,327 new missing adult cases filed in Harris County alone in 2025, out of 4,159 total missing adult reports across the full 14-county Houston-Galveston region. That region accounted for 34% of all 12,080 missing adult reports entered statewide into the National Crime Information Center last year.
Statewide, 40,309 total missing person reports were filed across Texas in 2025, with adults 18 and older making up roughly 30% of that figure, or 12,080 cases, per data from the nonprofit. Yet the two largest law enforcement agencies in the Houston-Galveston region investigated more than 11,000 missing persons cases across all age groups last year with a combined total of just 24 dedicated investigators, underscoring why rapid public alerts remain a critical tool for generating leads quickly.
The federal government has also taken notice of Texas's approach. In February 2024, the Federal Communications Commission proposed creating a new national Emergency Alert System event code for Missing and Endangered Persons, citing state programs like Texas's CLEAR Alert as models for closing similar gaps in adult missing person alerts nationwide.
Holden's case adds to a string of recent CLEAR Alert activations and cancellations across the Houston area, including one for a 56-year-old Alief woman found safe earlier this month and another for a 25-year-old Pearland woman reported missing in late August. HPD has not released details on the circumstances of Holden's recovery.
