Couple dies in floodwater

Alisin and Mark Genfan were “what you want in members of the community,” a longtime family friend said.

The Martindale couple died over the weekend after their truck was swept off Southeast River Road at Morrison Creek, the Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office said Monday.

They were last seen Friday prior to leaving their home on River Road to attend a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in downtown Martindale, but never arrived. Their son McCoy reported them missing the next morning. Caldwell Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. William Miller said their white Nissan pickup was found half submerged in the creek about two hours later, at approximately 10:30 a.m. Alisin Genfan’s body was found at approximately 11 a.m. 

Search efforts involving multiple agencies continued until dark then resumed Saturday morning, locating the body of Mark Genfan about 11 a.m. and a mile and a half downstream from where the truck was found.

The couple, both 62, owned Genfan Family Farm, and Alisin was a regular at the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market in San Marcos, maintaining a booth where she sold produce, flowers, honey and crafts.

“She was all over the place in terms of what she brought,” recalled market manager Kevin Adams. “She did it with such an eye for craft. Everything was always done so well — she put a lot of love into it.”

Other vendors at the morning market were worried when she did not show up Saturday. Adams said she had been with the market since its inception 10 years ago. “She was for me the kind of poster child for what we were trying to do, trying to build,” he said, adding that he’s glad he had expressed that sentiment to her personally. “She was the exact kind of person we started the Saturday market for — a small- scale aspiring local grower.”

Alisin Genfan retired from the Texas Department of State Health Services last year and was farming full-time, something Adams said she had long looked forward to. “They wanted to live off the land.”

Mark Genfan was an audio engineer and studio designer and also the owner of Acoustic Spaces. 

Mark Genfan. Photo from Facebook

He was a full-time lecturer in the Sound Recording Technician program at Texas State University from 1999 to 2007, and still gave occasional lectures and demonstrations, Gary Hickinbotham of Texas State recalled.

“It was taking too much time away from his business,” Hickinbotham said of Mark Genfan’s association with Texas State. “We would bring him in once or twice a year to give a seminar or demonstration,” he said, adding that last year, Genfan involved students in a project to measure the acoustic properties of some panels he was thinking of using in studio design. “A number of students worked with him, interned with him,” he said. 

Hickinbotham, who said he’d known Mark Genfan since Fire Station Studio was owned by the late Lucky Tomblin (it is now owned by the university) and last saw him a couple of weeks ago. 

“We were going to have lunch. Now that’s not going to happen ... he was a good fellow and pretty smart. One way or the other they reached a lot of people — Mark was in our world and Alisin at Farmer’s Market. They were a remarkable couple. It’s just tragic.”

 Adams had also known the couple a long time. “One of my first jobs I had here was building a fence around what would be their garden. That was 18 years ago,” he said.

Agencies involved in the search for the couple included Texas Parks and Wildlife, TEXSAR, the Martindale Volunteer Fire Department and the Caldwell County Office of Emergency Management.

Many Caldwell County roads were closed on Friday after heavy rains. The area was under a small streams advisory.