Houston personal injury attorney Tony Buzbee wants Gov. Greg Abbott to order the Texas Rangers to investigate the “suspicious” death of Texas A&M undergrad Brianna Aguilera.
During an animated Friday press conference, the high-profile attorney said the state police should be looking into the matter if the Austin Police Department won’t assign a new detective to the case.
Buzbee accused Austin authorities of a messy and rushed investigation into Aguilera’s death, which homicide investigator Robert Marshal on Thursday ruled a suicide — even though autopsy results weren’t yet available.
“You can’t close a book in the middle of reading a chapter and say that it’s closed and it’s over,” Buzbee said. “That’s not how it works. You can’t misclassify a death like this. When you misclassify a death, you’re planting a lie in the soil where truth should grow.”
Throughout the nearly hour-long press conference on the 75th floor of Houston’s Chase Tower, Buzbee continuously poked at the Austin Police Department’s investigation and lambasted the media for accepting the official narrative as fact.
Officially, police say that Aguilera was asked to leave a Latin Economic Business Association tailgate at the Austin Rugby Club after becoming intoxicated before the Nov. 28 A&M-UT game. She then stumbled into a nearby wooded area, where she lost her phone, according to authorities.
She entered the 21 Rio Apartments in West Campus, where she was staying with a friend, at around 11 p.m, police also maintain. She then borrowed a friend’s cellphone shortly before 1 a.m. to call her boyfriend, after which an argument ensued.
Two minutes later, Aguilera’s remains were discovered by a bystander on the pavement 17 stories below.
Police say a deleted message in Aguilera’s phone was a suicide note, suggesting she ended her own life. However, both Buzbee and Aguilera’s mother, Stephanie Rodriguez, argue she was imaginative and completed a creative writing course the semester prior.
Buzbee’s criticism of APD primarily focused on what happened in those two minutes between when Aguilera gave her phone back to her friend, who was in the small, cramped apartment at the time of her fall. The attorney accused investigators of failing to question that friend or any of the other girls present in the unit at the time of Aguilera’s demise.
“Why not question all of the witnesses?” Buzbee posed online. “Why not question all of the witnesses … ? Why not examine all the phones of the friend group? We asked that question in a Zoom call [with Austin police.] You know what we were told? We don’t have the power to look at their phones. Hogwash.”
Buzbee also questioned why police allowed the leasee of the apartment where Aguilera was staying to vacate it — a fact he said the the department omitted — and why the friends who were with Aguilera waited until noon the next day to report her missing.
“The apartment is like a dorm,” Buzbee said. “It’s very small. There’s no way you can be in that apartment and hide if you’re in the apartment. People know you’re in that apartment.”
Buzbee emphasized during the press conference, however, that he is not pushing the narrative that APD is involved in a cover-up or conspiracy, but rather, that their work is “lazy and incompetent.”
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
