Mom Pays Tribute to Ala. Woman Found Dead Weeks After Leaving Bar and Texting ‘I Feel in Trouble’
The mother of Paighton Houston, the 29-year-old Alabama woman found dead in a shallow grave behind a home last Friday after she was last seen Dec. 20, is paying tribute to her daughter.
“Our family didn’t get the news we had hoped for but I am very grateful that Paighton is coming home,” Houston’s mother, Charlaine Houston, said in a Facebook post announcing her daughter’s death. “We don’t have to go through the torture of not knowing what was happening to her and where she could be. God answered our prayers, he brought her home to us.”
Houston’s body was found Friday morning behind a home in Hueytown, near Birmingham, after authorities received information about her body’s possible location the night before, WIAT, AL.com and ABC News reported.
On Monday, the Jefferson County Coroner said her cause of death was not immediately able to be determined and that further testing and examination were needed.
Houston was last seen leaving a bar in Birmingham with two men. She appeared to go with them willingly, according to witnesses.
Earlier that night, Houston had gotten a ride to the bar with a co-worker. After leaving the bar, she texted the co-worker, “If I call answer, I don’t know these people and I feel in trouble,” her mother wrote on Facebook on Dec. 28.
Neighbors told authorities the home at which Houston’s body was found was not inhabited. They said an elderly man had once lived there but was taken out of the home by his family when they decided to take care of him, AL.com reports.
Her body was wrapped in a blanket and was intact.
“Right now we have a lot more questions than answers,” Chief Deputy David Agee of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said, the outlet reports, “but we hope to have those answers real soon. We’re gonna work hard and we’re going to find out what happened.”
Authorities have received a search warrant for the home but no other information has been released.
“Paighton was 29 yrs old and had her full life ahead of her. She was robbed of that sometime over those 14 days,” a GoFundMe page created to help Houston’s family states.
