A Dallas woman was found driving in rural Mexico without remembering how she got there. NBC 5’s Keenan Willard shows how the town’s mayor used social media to help her return home.
A Dallas woman is back in the U.S. with her family days after she was found driving in a small town in rural Mexico with no knowledge of how she got there.
Enola Harris, 76, told police in Muzquiz, Coahuila, Mexico, that she had left her home in Dallas two days earlier – somehow ending up nearly 10 hours away and crossing the border into the Mexican state of Coahuila.
“It is so strange,” said Tania Flores, mayor of the town of Muzquiz.
After driving Harris back across the border into Texas on Sunday, the small-town mayor in Mexico told NBC 5 she still had questions about how this situation happened.
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“An old lady, 76 years old, that has amnesia, she ended up in a small little town in Mexico two days after,” Flores said. “She didn’t have clothes, and like how, how?”
It all started just after midnight on Saturday morning in the rural town of Muzquiz, located about an hour and a half southwest of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Police saw Harris with Texas plates driving the wrong way through downtown.
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“And they pull her over, and they realize that she did not have a clue where she was,” Flores said. “And she thought she was in Dallas.”
Flores told NBC 5 that Harris could answer some questions clearly but struggled with others, failing to identify what country she was in.
Harris could not explain to authorities how she ended up driving nearly 10 hours away from home or what she had been doing since the day she left North Texas.
“She crossed the border; she crossed some checkpoints because there are checkpoints inside Mexico, too,” Flores said. “And she ended up in this small city.”
Flores said she put Harris up in a hotel in town and tried all the numbers on her cell phone but didn’t get any answers.
“I decided to post it on my social media on Facebook,” Flores said.
Flores began sharing pictures and videos of Harris, asking her followers to help find Harris’s loved ones.
The posts were shared hundreds of times – eventually reaching Harris’s family.
On Sunday, Flores was able to drive Harris back to Texas, where a family member who lives in Houston met them.
Flores said she told Harris to keep in touch and that Houston Police have begun investigating what happened during the gap in Harris’s memory.
“If she really has amnesia, it can be dangerous to herself, I don’t know,” said Flores. “But at the end, I feel glad that we took care of her for the three days that we had her in Mexico.”
The Dallas Police Department told NBC 5 they haven’t received any reports about Harris and are not investigating the situation.
NBC 5 also reached out to Houston Police for confirmation that they’re looking into the matter.
