Curtis Gresham, the 68-year-old Houston man who vanished from a Crestmont Street block, has been found safe, and the regional Silver Alert issued for him has officially been cancelled. The resolution closes out the search.
A Search Comes to a Close
Gresham was last seen on foot around 7 pm in the 6600 block of Crestmont Street in Houston, wearing a gray shirt and gray pants, according to the Texas Center for the Missing. The nonprofit, which serves as the regional administrator for Silver, AMBER, and CLEAR alerts across a 14-county Greater Houston area, confirmed Thursday that the Houston Regional Silver Alert for Gresham had been cancelled after he was located safe. In a post on X, TX Center 4 Missing
wrote simply that Gresham “was located safe” and that “the Silver Alert has been cancelled,” thanking the public for sharing his case.
The organization had kept pressure on the search throughout the ordeal. A message posted on September 11 reported that Gresham was still missing at that point and asked the public to keep sharing his case to help bring him home to his family. Authorities have not publicly disclosed where Gresham was located or the circumstances of his recovery.
Why Silver Alerts Take Strict Medical Proof
Not every missing senior qualifies for the kind of public notification that helped keep Gresham's case visible. Under Texas Government Code sections 411.382 and 411.386, local police can only activate a Silver Alert if a missing person is 65 or older and has a documented impaired mental condition, which requires written medical confirmation from a doctor or mental health professional, per FindLaw. The framework itself dates back to 2007, when the Texas Legislature created the statewide Silver Alert system under Senate Bill 1315, modeling it after AMBER Alerts but specifically for missing senior citizens with cognitive impairments, according to Texas Legislature Online.
Once activated, a Silver Alert runs for 24 hours; local agencies are contacted at 12-, 18-, and 23-hour intervals and may request an extension. Gresham's Silver Alert was ultimately cancelled after he was located safe.
Houston's Outsized Share of Missing Adult Cases
Gresham's disappearance adds to a heavy local caseload. In 2025, 4,159 missing adult cases were filed across the 14-county Houston-Galveston region, including 3,327 cases in Harris County alone, accounting for 34 percent of all missing adult reports filed statewide in Texas that year, the Texas Center for the Missing's own data shows. Statewide, law enforcement agencies logged 40,309 total missing person reports in 2025, a figure that included 12,080 adults aged 18 and older alongside 28,229 juveniles under 18.
Despite the scale of that caseload, research suggests Texas's Silver Alert system is largely effective. A study analyzing Texas Department of Public Safety Silver Alert data from 2017 to 2022, published in JAMA Network Open, found that 94.7 percent of missing older adults with dementia were ultimately located. The sample had a median age of 77, and 380 of the 524 subjects were men. The study also reported that Silver Alert events peaked on Wednesdays, at 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., and on holidays.
The Texas Center for the Missing, founded in March 2000 by Doreen Wise following the disappearance and death of her 17-year-old son Gabriel Lester, has coordinated Silver Alert cases across the region for more than two decades, as Hoodline has previously reported. In Houston-area cases like Gresham's, the Houston Police Department instructs members of the public with information on missing seniors to contact its Missing Persons Unit at 832-394-1840, or to call 911 in an emergency.
