Family mourns 21-year-old shot dead in northeast Harris County home

Family members are mourning Maysie Murphy, a 21-year-old Crosby woman found shot to death inside a home in northeast Harris County, while investigators work through a case that began with a disturbing call about a woman saying she was seeing demons.

Deputies responded Monday afternoon to the home on Adlong Johnson Road near U.S. 90 in Crosby, where they found Murphy dead from an apparent gunshot wound. Harris County authorities later identified the suspect as 55-year-old Courtney Smith, who was charged with murder and booked into the Harris County Jail.

A judge set Smith’s bond at $1 million and later ordered her to undergo a psychological evaluation. She was due back in court in July. Officials said deputies had already been called to the same house earlier that day because Smith reportedly made the claim about seeing demons, but there was not enough information at that point to justify an emergency detention order.

The shooting quickly took on a separate layer of confusion. Smith reportedly told deputies she had killed her granddaughter and her boyfriend, but investigators later said Murphy was not her biological granddaughter. Authorities described Murphy instead as an acquaintance or someone who was like a granddaughter to the homeowners, a detail that deepened the shock for relatives and neighbors trying to make sense of what happened inside the Crosby-area home.

Later reporting said Smith confessed to shooting Murphy and told investigators there was no evidence of a second victim inside the home. That account narrowed the case back to a single homicide, but it left unanswered questions about the earlier mental-health call and what intervention, if any, might have changed the outcome before the violence.

Murphy’s life was rooted in the same community now grieving her death. An obituary lists Maysie Elizabeth Murphy as born Jan. 12, 2005, in Baytown, and raised in Crosby, where she attended school. Crosby sits in eastern Harris County just outside Houston, near Farm Road 2100 and the Southern Pacific tracks, about two miles north of State Highway 90.

For Harris County, the case is another reminder of how domestic crises, mental-health warning signs and gun violence can collide in a matter of hours. In this case, a family loss in Crosby has become part homicide investigation, part warning about the limits of emergency response, and part urgent question for a county that continues to wrestle with both violence and crisis intervention.