Austin will pay Robert Springsteen, Mike Scott, Forrest Welborn and the family of Maurice Pierce a total of $35 million in restitution after they were wrongfully accused of the yogurt shop murders.<\/p>\n
City Manager T.C. Broadnax said the city agreed to a settlement with the three men accused of the killing of four teenage girls in 1991, as well as Pierce’s family. Pierce died in 2010. <\/p>\n
Broadnax said the settlement closed “the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history.”<\/p>\n
“We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event,” Broadnax said in a statement.<\/p>\n
News of the settlement was first reported by<\/a> the Austin American-Statesman.<\/p>\n The four men were accused of the murders of teenagers Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, and Jennifer and Sarah Harbison at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop in December 1991.<\/p>\n The brutal crime shocked the city and haunted Austin for decades. <\/p>\n Scott and Springsteen were both charged and convicted of murder in 1999. But the state’s highest criminal court later threw out those charges. Pierce was held for years on a charge before being released<\/a> from a Travis County Jail in 2003. Pierce later struggled with his mental health and was fatally shot<\/a> by an Austin police officer in 2010. Welborn’s charges were dropped<\/a> in 2000. <\/p>\n The case went unsolved until last October, when Austin police said they were confident Robert Eugene Brashers killed the girls in 1991 after discovering new forensic and ballistic evidence. Brashers was connected to numerous murders before he died in 1999.<\/p>\n Attorney Tony Diaz, who has represented Scott since 1999, told KUT News the agreement happened faster than he had anticipated. The tentative deal marks the end of a long saga, he said, but allows for some reform to benefit people who could be falsely accused in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cMichael is very happy in the sense that we could be fighting this thing for a long time,\u201d Diaz said. \u201cBut rather than go down that route, we all chose to do it in good faith and come to an agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n The collective settlement also comes with a guarantee that Austin would reform certain aspects of its policing practices that allowed the four men \u2014 then underage and unaccompanied in their interrogations \u2014 to be wrongfully convicted, Diaz said. <\/p>\n