Justice for Cayley

10/09/2024

I am honored to be an invited speaker at the upcoming Caldwell County Family Violence Task Force conference (I will link details in the comments). For a number of legal reasons, I have historically been unable to speak deeply or frankly regarding key aspects of my daughter’s killing. But things have now changed, and it’s time for me to take the gloves off because we can’t make progress against the scourge of DV without fully confronting its basis.

02/15/2024

Thank you KTRK for this great coverage of the CLEAR Alert and the unique personal stories that help to define it!

02/13/2024

A female carjacking victim recounts the details of her kidnapping in this 4-minute video. Here is what helped to save her life:

(1) She was able to secretly text an emergency code phrase to a family member who was then able to confirm for police that she was kidnapped. That apparently allowed a CLEAR Alert to be issued quickly.

(2) Her car was located via GPS, although she was not able to activate that service until several hours after she was kidnapped.

The CLEAR Alert is one tool in the personal safety toolbox. It works best when combined with other measures that help shift the balance of power in favor of the victim, as this case clearly shows:

While clutching onto her rosary, the woman who was at the center of a CLEAR Alert earlier this month recounts a harrowing experience she says that started wi...

01/27/2024

The point of advocacy is not to seek applause on social media. The point is to set a positive example that empowers others. Among the millions of people who watched our “48 Hours” episode, there are violent crime victims who woke up this morning thinking, “These parents accomplished something good, and maybe I could, too.” Nothing that Lawrence or I could do in this world would be more important than inspiring people that way.

CBS published a copy of the episode on YouTube yesterday, in addition to hosting it on their own website. In one day, that secondary drop garnered 400,000 views. I am working my way through the first 1,300 comments so that I can see my daughter’s story through the eyes of the viewers, which is a form of learning that helps me with focus and message clarity. Their feedback is surprisingly upbeat – I expected to see more contrarians, flamers, and keyboard warriors. But in a news world defined by polarization and conflict, I guess a story of parents protecting their child has universal appeal.

01/23/2024

Here’s a perfect example of an untapped method by which a murder victim’s surviving loved ones can assist the criminal justice process.

The much-touted social media content in our case? Capturing that was on us (mostly Lawrence) because law enforcement agencies do not have the bandwidth to do the precise continual monitoring that it demands - it can become an extremely time-consuming game of cat and mouse.

But it’s worth doing because trash takes itself out, and murderers are often their own worst enemies. They will self-incriminate online, and the trick is catching them in the act and preserving enough electronic evidence to be admissible in court. It can be done, but it takes training and cleverness, and that empowering knowledge is part of what we intend to bring to the murder survivor community.

01/22/2024

What decent parent would not want to help get justice for their child? They all do! Love and energy are both endless, but parents lack a roadmap for working within the criminal justice system to achieve the types of contributions that only they can make. Unfortunately, a show like “48 Hours” is only 42 minutes long, and this weekend’s episode barely scratched the surface of what Lawrence and I learned from our pool of experts. We are exploring other means of telling that whole story so that other parents can become empowered, and justice can be served.

Experiencing the loss of a child is an agonizing ordeal, and regrettably, this was the heart-wrenching journey Cayley Mandadi’s parents had to endure. In October 2017, they received the devastating news that their daughter was declared brain dead, prompting her transfer to a medical facility in Ky...

01/20/2024

Behind the scenes, I was asked, “How on earth did you find those actors?! You did a better job of casting them than a professional would have!”

Answer: Greater Houston is home to 7.3 million people. Every resource we need is right here - it’s just a matter of networking to find it. Here’s a storyboard describing that part of our journey:

01/19/2024

We could not disclose this publicly before now, but Lawrence and I conducted our own independent investigations into Cayley’s death. There was *no way* we were going to sit back and do nothing after the 2019 mistrial - we needed to help get justice for our daughter.

Mark Howerton sold the car in which he was found guilty of fatally beating Cayley, allegedly in order to raise the money that he needed to bond out of jail. We tracked that car down, bought it, and commissioned a crime scene reconstruction that included a video showing a theory of how he inflicted one of the blows that ultimately killed Cayley.

There is so much more to Cayley’s story that has not yet been told, and the upcoming “48 Hours” episode is just the beginning of that. With Howerton now sentenced to 20 years in prison, we are finally free to speak.

Cayley Mandadi’s mother is a scientist. Her stepfather is a NASA engineer. They track down and buy the suspect’s car where they believe she suffered her fata...

01/18/2024

On Saturday January 20, 2024 at 9:00 p.m. Central time, CBS will air our second “48 Hours” episode titled “For the Love of Cayley Mandadi”. A preview is linked below, and it will also stream on the Paramount+ service.

As with the initial episode titled “The Final Hours of Cayley Mandadi”, we participated in this production - “we” meaning Cayley’s Mom, Stepdad, best friend Taylor Clement, and possibly other loved ones (we do not control who or what CBS includes).

Our intention is always to honor Cayley with our legislative and nonprofit activities, including our violent crime victims’ rights initiatives. Public outreach and education are essential components of that work, and we can’t reach vulnerable women and support violent crime victims unless we are known. We realize that not everyone has a positive impression of the true crime documentary TV genre, but it represents a powerful means of reaching millions of people, a few of whose lives might be saved through exposure to Cayley’s story and the greater domestic violence awareness that comes from it. We are absolutely certain that Cayley would have wanted to help save innocent lives this way, just as she insisted on doing as an organ donor.

I suspect that the coming episode will provide a richer account of Cayley’s story. The earlier episode was produced following the 2019 mistrial, and I suspect that CBS was limited in how they could present it due to the journalistic standards that apply before a criminal trial verdict has been reached. “For the Love of Cayley Mandadi” is a post-sentencing account produced with fewer restrictions and, I hope, with greater heart.

We thank all of you for your support over the years, and we will have more to come.

—Alison Steele (Cayley’s Mom)

Chris Young Ritzen CBS News

After their daughter’s violent death, a mother and stepfather track down the suspect’s car for answers. "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant reports Saturday, Jan. 20 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

12/01/2023

Superb reporting from KPRC2 / Click2Houston! To elaborate on the response provided by Houston Police Department about why an alert was not issued for Ms. Campos, I don’t have specific knowledge of this case but it appears that there simply wasn’t enough to go on. If there are no verifiable facts indicating a risk to someone’s life, and/or if there is no specific information that the public could use to help find the person, then the alert criteria are not met. That does not mean that the missing person is not important - it just means that the CLEAR Alert is not the right tool for the job under those circumstances.

My heart goes out to the family of Ms. Campos. They are now living our same endless nightmare in which a male sociopath slaughters their innocent daughter for the “sin” of trying to break up with him.

However, I am glad to see that Ms. Campos had apparently permitted a trusted person to track her on “Find My Friends” or a similar phone app. According to reports, that allowed her family to locate her body quickly and in a dignified manner. For as long as my daughter Cayley was a minor child, I required her to allow me to track her. But once she turned 18 years of age, she refused to continue to give me access, and she was an adult so there was nothing I could do about it. I don’t think she had granted access to anyone else either, and her situation might have turned out differently if she had been quickly locatable instead of being severely beaten and driven around for hours afterward by her killer, which is what the evidence suggests happened. Please consider designating a trusted emergency contact who is able to locate you by electronic means. There are multiple circumstances in which you might need quick assistance and they are not all criminal situations - you could suffer an injury or a medical episode, or your car could break down, or your rideshare driver could wreck, etc. I allow my location to be tracked because I feel that the safety gains outweigh the privacy losses if I trust the person who has access to my data. It takes a village, and one person in my little village always knows where I am.

Do you know what a CLEAR Alert is?