GALVESTON COUNTY, Texas — Cold case investigators in Galveston County said they’re getting closer to bringing justice to the family of a woman who was killed on Crystal Beach 17 years ago.
Bridgette Gearen was on vacation at the beach in 2007 with her daughter, Kyra, who was 2 at the time, and her co-workers. Kyra’s dad, Bridgette’s fiancé, Brandon Portie stayed home. She was from Orange and worked for an attorney's office in Beaumont, according to files from our sister station, KBMT in Beaumont.
Portie said Bridgette and some of the others decided to go for a walk on the beach one night. She was the first to leave the beach house.
“By the time she left the beach house and went downstairs, within like a minute, she was gone,” Portie said.
The others looked for her throughout the night but to no avail. Her body wasn’t found until the next day. She had been raped and strangled to death.
“Paramedics were camping on the beach that night and found her floating in the water the next morning,” Portie said.
In the years that followed, no arrests were ever made. Although there have been suspects in the past, no charges have ever been filed.
“I’m tired of hearing, ‘We’re getting close,’ and I’ll say something to Kyra about it, and a year, year and a half goes by and we haven’t seen nothing or heard nothing,” Portie said.
Portie has heard it before and has gotten his hopes up too many times to count, he said. Investigators said there are more than 1,000 pages of documents and reports for Bridgette’s case. They saaid it’s not a cold case, they call it an old case, one of the most brutal they said they’ve ever seen. Portie has been there since the beginning -- closely following the investigation for all these years. He has an idea about what happened.
“My thought is they probably ran into each other on the beach earlier that day,” Portie said. “And you know, they followed her to where she was staying and waited, and then when she came down the stairs, there was more than one dude. I’ve been told up to about four. And they grabbed her and that was it.”
Investigators will only say they’re close to finally solving the case. They said new evidence obtained in the past year could finally help to bring this mystery to an end. They won’t share what that evidence is, and they said no arrests have been made, no charges have been filed and a grand jury has not been presented the case yet.
“Someone needs to answer for what they did in this life,” Portie said. “Not the afterlife, this life. They don’t need to be going through life just living their life. They took one, it’s not their right to do that.”
Portie and Bridgette’s family can only hope that this time will be different; that the closure they’ve dreamed of for so many years is almost here.
“I really want to see these guys brought to justice,” Portie said. “For her mother’s sake, for Kyra’s sake, and for Bridgette’s sake. Something’s got to happen.”