The mother of a Texas A&M student is demanding answers after her daughter was found dead just hours after attending a college football tailgate.
As reported by the New York Post, 19-year-old Brianna Aguilera, a sophomore at Texas A&M University, was discovered dead outside an apartment complex around 1:00AM on Saturday, only hours after attending the Aggies’ tailgate for their highly anticipated football clash with the University of Texas.
Police have told her family that Aguilera fell 17 stories and that her death is being treated as an apparent suicide — but her mother, Stephanie Rodriguez, insists there’s much more to the story.
“There are a lot of inconsistencies with the story,” Rodriguez told KSAT. “He told me they said she jumped, and then he told me that the friends said they didn’t know her whereabouts.”
Rodriguez says she first became worried when she couldn’t reach her daughter after the tailgate. By 6:00PM on Friday, Aguilera’s phone had gone silent — and what made it even stranger, Rodriguez said, was that her phone was on Do Not Disturb, something her daughter “never” did when she was out.
“What was weird to me and skeptical was her phone was on Do Not Disturb,” she told KGNS. “We always had this rule that if she was going to go out, she had to have her phone on ‘location on’ and answer her text to at least let me know she was ok. That stopped happening around 6 p.m.”
When calls went unanswered, Rodriguez contacted the Austin Police Department. But she claims officers told her she couldn’t file a missing persons report until 24 hours had passed.
Her daughter’s phone was later traced to a location near a creek, but police allegedly refused to check the area. “Which scared me the most,” Rodriguez said, “because all these murders have been coming out in Austin and bodies have been found in creeks.”
By the next morning, Aguilera’s phone was still pinging in the same spot. Hours later, around 1:00AM, police received a call that a body had been found near a nearby apartment building. It was Aguilera.
Her mother said she didn’t find out until 4:00PM Saturday that her daughter’s body was in the morgue. Aguilera was identified through fingerprint analysis.
Rodriguez has made it clear she does not believe her daughter took her own life.
“This was not accidental. Someone killed my Brie and gave all the group of friends a lot of time to come up with the same story,” she wrote on Facebook, per the New York Post. “My daughter would not jump 17 stories from a building, and to be labeling this as a suicide is insane. My daughter loved life and was excited to graduate and pursue her career in law.”
According to the mother, her daughter was a high-achieving student — a magna cum laude graduate from United High School in Laredo, a “seasoned cheerleader,” and a student at The Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M, where she was pursuing her dream of becoming a lawyer.
“She was pursuing her dream of becoming a lawyer and was attending The Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M,” reads a statement on a GoFundMe set up for her family. “The details surrounding what happened next remain unclear, and her mother is still awaiting answers.”
That GoFundMe has now raised more than $32,000, more than doubling its original $12,000 goal.
Rodriguez says she feels ignored by investigators and frustrated by what she calls a lack of urgency from the Austin Police Department.
“I asked and demanded for another detective to be assigned to the case, and they said no,” she told KGNS. “They even told me their geometric system was broken. That they were eyeballing the distance where my daughter fell which is the 18th floor, down to her death.”
She claims police failed to question the people who were with her daughter that night until the next day.
“They told me that they saw a group of friends going into the apartment and they saw a group of friends leaving but my daughter was not there,” Rodriguez said. “They interviewed the girls that were with her in the apartment. But they interviewed them a whole day later. They interviewed them at 1 p.m. that Saturday instead of investigating at the time of the scene.”
Rodriguez believes that one of the 15 people inside the apartment knows what happened.
“There was a fight that happened between my daughter and another girl, and they were all staying in the same apartment that I have actual text messages of, and the detective just disregarded them,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Austin Police Department told The Post that the case is not currently being treated as a homicide, and that “no suspicious circumstances” have been found so far.
“At this time, the incident is not being investigated as a homicide, and there are no indications of suspicious circumstances,” the statement said. “The cause of death will be determined by the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office.”
The Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office performed an autopsy on Sunday, with results still pending.
Texas A&M University has not yet commented publicly on Aguilera’s death.
For Rodriguez, the loss has been indescribable — and the lack of closure unbearable.
“I’ve experienced every parent’s worst fear, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that my Brie Brie touched so many hearts,” she wrote in a message shared with donors. “The unexpected loss of my Brie Brie has been a tremendous challenge, but I find strength in the outpouring of kindness.”
She and her family have travelled from Laredo to Austin to meet investigators face-to-face, still demanding answers about how their daughter — a driven student with her whole life ahead of her — could fall 17 stories in a building full of people without anyone knowing what happened.
Featured image credit: GoFundMe
