Mother wants justice in her daughter's strangling

HOUSTON Witnesses say the woman got into a car with a man after her car was towed from a lot near the bus station on Main Street. Her mother later got a text message from the woman saying she was in danger.

Raquel Mundy, 24, was strangled sometime between the early morning hours of Thursday and Friday when her body was discovered. Now her mother, whom Mundy dropped off at the bus station where she was last seen alive, is talking.

Mundy's mother is reeling from the murder of her daughter last week.

"This man took away my baby. She has a four year old and four-month-old girl. If anyone knows anything," said Angela Collins.

Mundy had taken her mom and her two young daughters to the Greyhound bus station around 1:30am Thursday morning where they were catching a bus to California.

Mundy's car, parked at the McDonald's across the street, was towed and Mundy looked for friends or family to take her to the tow yard. Witnesses say they saw her getting into a gray car with an Hispanic man.

It would be hours before there was any outside sign something was wrong.

"It was a text message. It was at 7:44am that morning is the text message that she sent to her mom," said Sr. Officer R. Bolton, Houston Police Department investigator.

That text message was matter of fact and frightening, saying she thought the man would hurt her.

"After I got the text message, I immediately tried to call her. I text, I text and I started panicking. I was on the bus at the time coming to California," said Collins.

Mundy's partially clothed body was found on St. Charles Street on Friday. Investigators have talked to a person of interest, but they are still looking for anyone who may have seen anything.

Her mother is pleading for justice for her daughter, and at the same time she remembers a different text she got from her that same morning.

"There was one other message at 5:38am, it says, 'Mom, tell my girls I love them,'" Collins said.

Mundy was new to Texas and moved to Galveston from California to go to school in the last month.

Anyone with information in this case is urged to call the HPD Homicide Division at 713-308-3600 or Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.

We wanted to take a look at crime in the area around the Greyhound bus station. Our exclusive Crime Tracker compared January and February of this year to the same time frame last year. In 2009, there were seven aggravated assaults in that area, compared with 20 in the first two months of this year.

When looking at other violent crimes, there were 26 last year and 38 this year. Robbery in the same area was down 18 percent.