AUSTIN, Texas (Scripps News Corpus Christi) — A Laredo family is demanding answers after their 19-year-old daughter was found dead following a tailgate party for the Texas A&M versus the University of Texas game on November 28.
Brianna Aguilera, a Texas A&M student who aspired to become a lawyer, was in Austin tailgating for the rivalry game when she was found dead just hours later at a student apartment complex near UT’s campus.
Aguilera was discovered by a bystander after her mother, Stephanie Rodriguez, spent hours trying to locate her daughter and pressuring Austin police to search for the teen before she was notified of her death.
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“No one reached out to me. I was the one that had to place several calls to Austin PD because I couldn’t locate her. I knew where her location was at but, what was weird to me and skeptical was that her phone was on Do Not Disturb, and we always had this rule that if she was going to go out, she had to have her phone on ‘location on’ and she was going to answer her text to at least let me know she was okay. And so that stopped happening,” Rodriguez told Scripps News Corpus Christi.
Austin police told Rodriguez that 24 hours had to pass before filing a missing persons report.
Rodriguez is now preparing for what she called “the hardest day that is probably going to be in (her) life, to put (her) daughter to rest.”
The family is questioning officials’ theory about how Aguilera died, though specific details about the investigation have not been released.
This story was originally published by Scripps News Corpus Christi, an E.W. Scripps Company.
