The city of Austin will pay $35 million to resolve claims brought by Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and the family of Maurice Pierce, who spent years imprisoned or under prosecution for a crime they did not commit — the brutal slayings of four teenage girls at an “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” shop in December 1991. The settlement, announced Tuesday by City Manager T.C. Broadnax, closes the final legal chapter in a case that saw two men sent to prison, one put on death row, and all four eventually cleared when DNA evidence pointed to a dead man.
The four victims — Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15 — were bound, gagged and shot in the head. The building was set on fire. The crime haunted Austin for decades, generating thousands of leads and several false confessions before the arrests of the four men in 1999, when they were teenagers.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted in separate trials largely on the strength of confessions they later said were coerced by police interrogators. Springsteen was sentenced to death; Scott received life in prison. Both convictions were overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which cited errors in the admission of the confessions. In 2009, after new DNA testing that was unavailable at the time of the original investigation excluded both men and pointed to an unknown male, a judge dismissed all charges against them.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries declined to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before charges were dropped. He was killed in a 2010 police shooting after a traffic stop.
In 2025, investigators using advanced DNA techniques and fresh ballistics analysis concluded that Robert Eugene Brashers had acted alone. Brashers, who had a violent criminal record in several states, died by suicide during a police standoff in Kennett, Missouri, in 1999. The break in the Austin case came when DNA extracted from under one victim’s fingernail matched a profile from Brashers’ earlier killing of a South Carolina woman.
Under the tentative agreement, the city will pay $35 million, though the distribution of the funds among the exonerated men and Pierce’s family was not disclosed. The Austin City Council must still approve the deal. “This settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected.”
In a joint statement, Scott and his attorney Tony Diaz said discussions about police reforms are ongoing. “Discussions and negotiations are ongoing regarding police reforms that would help ensure that nothing like what occurred in this case ever happens again,” they said.
In February 2026, a Travis County judge formally declared the four men innocent, clearing their names after more than three decades. The declaration followed the 2025 determination by investigators that Brashers was the sole killer.