🚓 How APD solved the yogurt shop murders

🚓 UT Stabber Could Be Released

Kendrex White, the man found not guilty by reason of insanity in the 2017 stabbing of University of Texas at Austin student Harrison Brown, could be released from a state mental hospital this week. Officials at a hearing on Wednesday will decide if White has been rehabilitated enough for outpatient services. [KXAN]

📰 Anti-DEI Official Urged Schools to Use DEI

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who has said he is against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, emphasized a student’s ethnicity and socioeconomic status when he asked The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at San Antonio to reconsider her enrollment. [The Texas Tribune]

🥇 2 Austin Restaurants Make Eater’s Best List

Franklin Barbecue and Veracruz All Natural are named on Eater’s list of the most influential restaurants in the U.S. over the past two decades. [Eater]

🚒 Wages Raised for Firefighters in New Contract

Austin firefighters will receive a 3% raise over four years, and their hours will be reduced to fewer than 50 a week under a new agreement between the city and the department. [KUT]

Retired Austin Police Det. John Jones finally got to wear a shirt he’d been saving for 34 years.

The night of the 1991 murders at Austin’s I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop, Jones, one of two detectives on the case, was wearing an obnoxiously bright shirt for a homicide detective — a kelly green-and-white-striped button-down that his colleagues ridiculed. He still had it on when he met with the families of the victims, Jennifer Harbison, 17; Sarah Harbison, 15; Eliza Thomas, 17; and Amy Ayers, 13, and promised them, “When you see me in this shirt again, it’s gonna be because the case is solved.”

Jones wore his bright shirt at Austin City Hall on Monday morning, where he sat in the crowd at a news conference announcing the case was solved, after years of twists and turns in the crime that shook Austin’s innocence. Using DNA technology and a shell casing, investigators were able to link Robert Eugene Brashers to the crime, said Det. Dan Jackson, who took over the case in 2022. Brashers died by suicide in 1999 after a police chase.

Jones, now retired and living in Denver, didn’t want to miss the press conference.

“Amazingly enough, it still kinda fits,” Jones, in his bright green shirt, told City Cast Austin.

Brashers had no connection to Austin, police said, and left town within 48 hours of the killings. Austin police had other suspects at the time — there were dozens of false confessions, including one from Maurice Pierce, which was discredited at the time but then dug back up in 1999 by a task force that interrogated him and three suspected accomplices, two of whom confessed. Two suspects went to trial and were convicted, but after a United States Supreme Court ruling called their confessions into question, DNA that was collected at the scene was tested, and the men were released.

Armed with a DNA profile of an unknown male in 2009, APD tested hundreds of DNA samples searching for a match, to no avail. The case went cold again.

City Cast Austin discussed the yogurt shop murder case on today's podcast. Listen below. ⬇️