Body of reigning Mrs. Dallas pageant queen was found in lake, medical examiner reports

The body of Lashun Massey, the reigning Mrs. Dallas pageant queen, was pulled on Thursday from a northwest Texas lake, authorities said.

Massey, 38, was a program manager for research at the University of Texas at Dallas and was to be a part of the Mrs. Texas America pageant later this year.

The Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office on Saturday said that Massey was the woman whose body was found in Lago de Claire in Irving on Thursday, KTVT-TV reported.

Massey was reported missing Tuesday when she did not return home from her morning walk. Witnesses saw a woman who fit Massey’s description walk out of Lake de Claire on Tuesday morning, stand on a bench and walk off, Irving police spokesman Robert Reeves said.

Massey’s mother, Mary Ross, said that her daughter did not know how to swim.

“There’s no way she would have played or gotten in the water,“ Ross said, according to KTVT. “We really haven’t gotten any answers.”

Massey was the mother of two young boys and authored the autobiography, “The Face of the New Engineer.” She wrote on her website that she wrote the book “to help inspire and motivate others to pursue science and engineering careers.”

A longtime neighbor of the Massey family said Massey’s husband is “distraught.”

“He had not a shred of a warning that this was going to happen,” Michael Shaub told the Dallas Morning News.

This story was originally published May 1, 2021 at 8:03 PM.