More On: Christina Powell
Christina Powell, a mother from Texas, went to the mall half an hour after leaving home, but she wasn't found for three weeks
Missing Christina Powell, a mother from Texas, was last seen rushing to work, but she never showed up
Christina Powell, a mother from Texas, left her house in a hurry and got to the strip mall 30 minutes later, but her body wasn't found until 3 weeks later.
Police and doorbell footage show that Powell, 39, left her San Antonio home quickly around 10:30 a.m. on July 5 after telling her mother she was late for her paralegal job.
The Daily Mail said that a security camera caught her black 2020 Nissan Rogue pulling into the Huebner Oaks Center just after 11 a.m.
The mother of two was found dead in the front passenger seat of her car on July 23. She had been reported missing weeks before.
San Antonio police said that a mall security guard walked up to the car after smelling a "bad odor" coming from it and seeing that it had been in the same spot for more than a week.
Powell's mother, Claudia Mobley, who is 70 years old, told The Daily Mail that police showed her footage from a jewelry store at the mall that showed her daughter never got out of the car when it pulled up to the mall and that she was alone at the time.
The Bexar County Medical Examiner hasn't said for sure what killed her yet, but he told the news outlet that it looks like she died from hyperthermia, or getting too hot.
The highest temperature that day, July 5, when Powell got to the lot, was 100 degrees, according to weather records. The day she was found, it was still 100 degrees.
Mobley said that she thinks her daughter had anxiety and that she must have been too sick to handle the heat.
She doesn't think Powell would have chosen to kill herself. She is most upset about how long it took security to find her daughter.
“I don’t understand how the car could have been there two-and-a-half weeks and they didn’t even notice it until July 11,” she told the Daily Mail.
“It is shocking, it really is. It just makes me quite sick to think about it,” Mobley said. “It does seem wrong but I don’t know what to do about it.”
The Daily Mail said that signs at the entrance to the shopping center say there is security 24 hours a day and that cars that stay too long will be towed. But the owners of the stores said that security guards only work from 10 a.m. to midnight.
A mall security guard told the outlet that a marked security car does a quick check of the parking lot every hour. The guard works for Pro Security Group Inc. in Waco. He said that guards don't usually work at the mall but are sent to different places every day.
“[The car] was there the whole time,” Mobley said. “I do wonder why it took that security guard so long – he said he noticed it on the 11th and it was the 23rd before he checked it.”
