Four men accused in Austin’s yogurt shop murders have been exonerated

From KUT News:

Four men who had been accused, two of them convicted, in one of Austin’s most infamous murders have been declared officially innocent.

Maurice Pierce, Robert Springsteen, Mike Scott and Forrest Welborn were the key suspects in the 1991 murder of four teen girls at a yogurt shop.

Now, more than 34 years later, Travis County Judge Dayna Blazey has stated all are innocent, clearing their records and formally exonerating them after they were wrongfully accused in 1999.

Last year, police announced they believed Robert Eugene Brashers was guilty of the killing of Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, and Jennifer and Sarah Harbison at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop in December 1991. Brashers died in 1999, but police were able to tie him to the murders through forensic and DNA evidence after decades of searching for the real killer.

Travis County District Attorney José Garza filed a motion to revisit the case and formally clear their names late last year.

All four suspects were implicated, investigated and later arrested in the aftermath of the murders that drew national attention and haunted Austin for decades.

Springsteen, who was sentenced to death and spent 10 years in prison, said in a written statement read by his attorney, Amber Farrelly, that his wrongful arrest turned his life into a cycle of “chaos and uncertainty.”

“I have been persecuted every day,” Springsteen said. “I have lived every single day …being seen as a monster for something I did not do.”

Scott, the only exoneree who spoke in court, said the police who arrested him, and prosecutors who convinced a jury to give him life in prison, robbed him of his youth — of a full life.

“For decades I have carried the burden of wrongful conviction. Every day, I have carried the weight of a crime that I did not commit,” he said. “No court ruling can return the years and the love that were taken from me, but it can acknowledge the truth: I am not guilty.”

Both Springsteen and Scott maintained for decades that their confessions were coerced by police.

Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said Travis County’s wrongful prosecutions left defendants “screaming into the wind” for decades, and that it was “our turn to accept responsibility.”

“Simply said, both the science and the confessions can’t be true,” Strassburger said. “The truth is that Robert Eugene Brashers is guilty, and he alone committed the yogurt shop murders.”

Farrelly said the lives of “the boys” were cratered by their arrests and imprisonment. That impact is still there for three, but not for Maurice Pierce, who had a mental health episode in 2010 and was shot by an Austin police officer he attempted to stab.

“This case needs to change Austin. It needs to change Texas,” she said. “It is truly a miracle that we are here. A miracle that has come too late for Maurice Pierce — and has been denied for too long for Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn.”

Springsteen and Scott were convicted of murder in 1999. Scott was sentenced to life, while Springsteen was given the death penalty. Those cases were both thrown out in 2006 by the state’s highest criminal court.

Pierce spent more than three years in jail awaiting trial before his case was dismissed in 2003. Pierce later stabbed an Austin police officer and was fatally shot in 2010. Wellborn’s charges were dropped in 2000.

In tearful testimony, Pierce’s daughter, Marisa, said she will continue her fight for people wrongfully accused of crimes in Texas. She said the “tunnel vision” of police and prosecutors robbed him of his dignity, and that he was just an innocent boy when he was arrested at 15 years old.

Marisa said nobody heard him, or believed him, until today.

“Daddy, you have your name back,” she said. “The world finally hears what you were trying to say all along.”

After the hearing, Travis County DA José Garza apologized to the exonerees and their families, saying the time for healing had begun.

“It is my sincere hope that with this closure, we can begin to heal,” he said.

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