Austin is set to pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth individual who was wrongfully accused in the 1991 rapes and murders of four teenage girls at a yogurt store. This preliminary settlement was reached on Tuesday. Initially, one of the men received a death sentence while another was sentenced to life in prison.
The accused—Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn, and Maurice Pierce—had maintained their innocence regarding one of the city’s most infamous crimes.
The eventual breakthrough in the case came when a judge declared one of the accused innocent in February, after it was revealed that the actual suspect had passed away in 1999.
The settlement is awaiting City Council approval, and specifics about the payments to the accused and their families haven’t been disclosed.
Austin City Manager TC Broadnax commented that the settlement “closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history.” He expressed hope that it would provide some closure to those impacted by the tragic event.
Scott, alongside attorney Tony Diaz, expressed hopes that this settlement could spur improvements in investigative practices to prevent similar wrongful convictions in the future. They indicated that discussions about police reform are ongoing, aiming to ensure such an incident does not recur.
The victims included 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, and sisters 17-year-old Jennifer and 15-year-old Sarah Harbison, all of whom were brutally killed at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where they worked. The crime scene was later set ablaze.
Investigators had pursued countless leads and dealt with multiple false confessions leading to the arrests of four teenagers at the time of the murders in late 1999. Springsteen and Scott’s convictions largely stemmed from confessions they claimed were forced, both were eventually overturned in the mid-2000s. Welborn faced indictment, but two grand juries opted not to pursue charges against him, while Pierce spent three years imprisoned before being exonerated.
As for Springsteen and Scott, prosecutors wanted to retry them but were thwarted by a judge in 2009, who dismissed charges after new DNA evidence emerged—evidence that hadn’t been available during the initial trial. This evidence later identified a different suspect.
In 2025, investigators confirmed that new DNA techniques and a review of ballistics pointed to Robert Eugene Brashears as the actual perpetrator of the yogurt shop murders.
Brashears had been linked to several other serious crimes through advanced DNA evidence since 2018, including the strangulation death of a woman in South Carolina in 1990, a rape case from 1997, and a double homicide in Missouri in 1998. The connection to the Austin case was made when a DNA sample from under Ayers’ fingernails matched Brashears in the earlier murder case.
Brashears died in a Missouri motel in 1999 after taking his own life during a standoff with police.
