HOUSTON – Houston-based attorney Tony Buzbee said on Friday that the Austin Police Department (APD) rushed its investigation into the death of a former Texas A&M University student.
Brianna Aguilera, 19, was found unresponsive in the early morning hours of Nov. 29 outside an apartment complex in the 2100 block of Rio Grande Street, located in the heart of the student living area for University of Texas at Austin students.
>> What we know about Texas A&M student Brianna Aguilera’s death in Austin
Austin police officers suspect that Aguilera died by suicide. However, in a joint news conference with Gamez Law Firm and Aguilera’s mother, Buzbee argued APD does not have the authority to rule a cause of death.
“You can’t close a case before you even have the cause of death from the medical examiner,” Buzbee said. “Period, full stop. You don’t have that right, you don’t have that authority.”
Buzbee said he plans to send a formal request to Gov. Greg Abbott asking for the Texas Rangers to investigate Aguilera’s death.
"I’m going to submit a detailed packet to the governor’s office and ultimately to the Texas Rangers to actually do an investigation to figure out what actually happened, because we still don’t know," Buzbee said.
On Thursday, Austin police said Aguilera had written a suicide note that was addressed to specific people in her life. It was allegedly found in a deleted folder by police officers amid the investigation.
Buzbee suggested that the alleged suicide note, which he referred to as an “essay,” was nonsense in APD’s investigation.
“Then he (the detective) gets into her phone, and he sees an essay that she wrote, and he calls it a suicide note. She took creative writing the semester before,” Buzbee said. “We’ll never know what the purpose of what she wrote and deleted. But this is the suggestion, was that she left a ‘suicide note,’ total malarkey. Total malarkey.”
Buzbee does not believe there’s some conspiracy in Aguilera’s death. He stood behind the belief that the detective in the case was incompetent and lazy.
He also pointed out several apparent holes in the Austin Police Department’s investigation, including an alleged fight between Aguilera and another female at a tailgate. Buzbee said the same female was in the apartment unit where Aguilera later fell from the balcony.
Buzbee also stated that around the time of Aguilera’s death, there was a person who posted a TikTok video about an altercation at the apartment. There was fighting, screaming and somebody yelling “get off me” in the video, Buzbee said.
According to Buzbee and Aguilera’s mother, Stephanie Rodriguez, the Austin Police Department did not conduct a thorough investigation.
“My daughter was not suicidal. I know my daughter better than anyone,” Rodriguez said. “We spoke every day. I spoke to her on the 25th, the 26th, and the 27th, even the morning of the 28th. She was not suicidal.”
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