Austin Yogurt Shop Victims

Case background and investigation

On the night of December 6, 1991, four girls were killed inside an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop near Northcross Mall in Austin, Texas. According to Texas Public Radio and CBS News, Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison, both 17, were closing the shop, where they worked, and were joined by Jennifer's sister Sarah Harbison, 15, and Sarah's friend Amy Ayers, 13. The girls were bound, gagged and shot, and the building was set on fire, which destroyed much of the evidence. Police have said at least one victim was sexually assaulted.

The Austin Police Department formed a dedicated task force, and federal agencies assisted, but the case went cold. In 1999 a new team of investigators re-examined it and four men who had been teenagers in 1991 were arrested: Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn. CBS News reported that investigators obtained confessions from Springsteen and Scott, which both men later recanted, saying they had been coerced. A grand jury did not indict Welborn, and the charges against Pierce were dismissed in 2003 after he had spent years in the Travis County jail, according to Texas Public Radio.

Springsteen was convicted in 2001 and Scott in 2002. Both convictions were later thrown out by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. While prosecutors prepared to retry the men, Y-STR testing produced a partial male DNA profile that matched none of the four. The charges against Springsteen and Scott were dismissed in 2009 after the two had spent close to ten years in custody, CBS News reported. Pierce was shot and killed by an Austin police officer in 2010, according to KERA News.

In late September 2025, Austin police announced that they had identified Robert Eugene Brashers as the person responsible. Brashers, who died by suicide in January 1999 during a standoff with police in Missouri, had already been linked by DNA to murders in South Carolina and Missouri. At a news conference on September 29, 2025, detective Dan Jackson explained that a .380 shell casing recovered from a floor drain in the shop was resubmitted to a national ballistics database in June 2025 and produced a link to another cold case, and that retesting of Amy Ayers' fingernail clippings in September 2025 found DNA matching Brashers. Because Brashers is dead, no one can be prosecuted; Travis County District Attorney José Garza said the evidence pointed to the guilt of one man and the innocence of four.

On February 19, 2026, Travis County Judge Dayna Blazey declared Scott, Springsteen, Welborn and the late Maurice Pierce innocent and dismissed the charges against each of them with prejudice, KFVS reported. In May 2026 the City of Austin agreed to a $35 million settlement with the three surviving men and Pierce's family, and, according to KERA News, the police department agreed to ban unsupervised interrogations of underage suspects.

Relatives of the victims spoke publicly after the identification. Barbara Wilson, the mother of Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, said the families had never wanted anyone punished for something they did not do, Texas Public Radio reported.