Everyone thought Brianna Aguilera’s phone died with her on that 17th-floor balcony at 12:47 a.m.

They were wrong.

Last night, on the exact one-week anniversary of the Texas A&M cheerleader’s fatal fall, her aunt Marissa Rodriguez went live on Facebook from the family’s Laredo living room and detonated a bomb nobody saw coming.

“Brianna’s iCloud was still active,” Marissa said, voice shaking as she held up her own phone like evidence in court. “At 2:14 a.m. – almost an hour and a half after police say she was already dead – her location pinged for seven full minutes by Walnut Creek in North Austin. That’s eight miles from 21 Rio. Someone had her phone after she fell.”

The revelation has turned the entire Austin PD narrative inside out.

Until now, the official story was airtight:

Brianna goes over the balcony railing at 12:47 a.m.
Phone is found clutched in her hand on the courtyard grass.
Impact damage consistent with a 187-foot drop.
Location services frozen at 21 Rio from 11:30 p.m. onward.

But Marissa says the family never turned off Find My iPhone after Brianna was reported missing. And at 2:14 a.m., while Stephanie Rodriguez was still on the road racing from Laredo to Austin, Marissa refreshed the app one last time before collapsing into prayer.

The dot appeared.

A pulsing blue circle on the banks of Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park – a dark, wooded greenbelt popular with late-night partiers and, police admit, occasional body dumps.

“It stayed there seven minutes,” Marissa told the 42,000 people watching live. “Then it moved fast – like someone realized it was on and threw it in a car. By 2:27 a.m. it was gone forever. Battery dead or smashed.”

She immediately called APD’s tip line. The officer on duty allegedly told her, “Ma’am, the phone was recovered at the scene.” When she insisted on the creek ping, the call reportedly ended with, “We’ll look into it.”

They didn’t. At least not until Marissa’s live stream hit one million views by sunrise.

By 10 a.m. today, December 5, Austin PD issued a terse statement confirming they are “aware of additional location data” and have dispatched divers and K-9 units to Walnut Creek. They also quietly upgraded the case from “death investigation” to “homicide” for the second time in 48 hours.

Sources inside the investigation now admit the original phone recovered beneath Brianna’s body was a decoy – an older iPhone 12 with a cracked maroon case that friends say “looked like hers but wasn’t.” Brianna’s real phone – rose-gold iPhone 14, glitter PopSocket, screen protector with a tiny Aggie sticker – is still missing.

And someone took it on an eight-mile joyride while her mother was still screaming her name into voicemail.

Marissa didn’t stop at the GPS bomb. Holding back tears, she revealed screenshots Brianna sent her at 12:41 a.m. – six minutes before the fall:

Auntie, if anything happens to me tonight, it was Jake. He has a video. He said he’ll ruin me if I don’t “fix this.” I’m scared. Balcony. 21 Rio. 17th floor.

The messages were deleted from Brianna’s phone by 1:05 a.m., but iCloud keeps everything.

Jake Harlan – the same UT lacrosse player whose DNA was just found on the underside of the balcony railing – is now the subject of a nationwide manhunt. His Tahoe was spotted on traffic cams crossing into Oklahoma at 4:07 a.m. on December 3. His father’s private jet took off from Austin-Bergstrom at 6:12 a.m. that same day, flight plan filed for Nassau.

Stephanie Rodriguez, Brianna’s mom, spoke to reporters outside the Laredo home an hour after the live stream ended, still wearing the same clothes she had on when she identified her daughter’s body.

“They told me my baby jumped because she was drunk and sad,” she said, clutching the sequin cowboy hat now stained with tears and creek mud from the family’s own search party. “But her phone went for a ride after she was already gone. Somebody threw her off that balcony, took her phone to destroy evidence, and dumped it by the water thinking the creek would finish the job.”

She looked straight into the cameras.

“Whoever has my daughter’s real phone – you have seven days of her screams, her fights, her proof. Turn it in. Or we’ll find you the same way we found that ping.”

Tonight, Walnut Creek is lit up like a crime scene set: floodlights, cadaver dogs, dive teams in drysuits pulling mud for a rose-gold needle in a black-water haystack.

And somewhere out there, a phone that never actually died with Brianna keeps its secrets – battery long dead, but iCloud still whispering the truth to anyone who knows how to listen.

Seven minutes by the creek.

Seven minutes too late for a girl who just wanted to go home.

But maybe – just maybe – seven minutes that will finally bring her killer to the ground.