Mom’s blood ran cold at 6:37 p.m. on November 28, 2025. That was the exact moment Stephanie Rodriguez’s phone lit up with a single, chilling notification: Brianna’s iPhone had just pinged from the banks of a dark creek behind the Austin Rugby Club tailgate lot. No text. No call. Just a cold, mechanical dot on the Find My map, surrounded by water and shadows.
“I lost it,” Stephanie told Lawyer Herald in a voice that still trembles a week later. “I knew right then something was horribly wrong. All these murders in Austin lately, girls disappearing, bodies pulled from creeks… I screamed at my husband, ‘They’ve got my baby in the water!’”
That creek ping has become the ghost that refuses to die in the Brianna Aguilera case.
Because less than six hours after her phone mysteriously appeared in that creek (untouched by mud, untouched by water, almost lovingly placed on a rock), Brianna herself would plummet 170 feet from a 17th-floor balcony at 21 Rio Apartments. Austin PD called it “undetermined—possible suicide or accident.” Stephanie calls it murder. And that creek ping? It’s the breadcrumb the police still can’t explain.
Here’s what we now know:
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Brianna’s phone went missing around 6:30 p.m. during a heated argument at the tailgate. Witnesses saw it slip from her hand and vanish into the grass.
Security escorted her out at 10:01 p.m. (phone still missing).
At 11:13 p.m. she arrived at 21 Rio (still phoneless).
Sometime between 11:30 p.m. and midnight, her iPhone suddenly reappeared 400 yards away, pinging once from the creek bank before going dark forever.
K-9 units “miraculously” recovered it Sunday morning—dry, fully charged, not a scratch.
Stephanie’s exact words to detectives that night, preserved in the supplemental filings unsealed December 9: “My daughter is NOT suicidal. She is with people who took her phone and put it by that creek to make it look like something happened there. Check the creeks, check the water, check EVERYTHING. Those girls know what happened!”
Detectives told her to “calm down” and wait 24 hours to file a missing-person report.
Six hours later Brianna was dead.
Now the creek has become ground zero for the growing army demanding answers. TikTok sleuths have mapped every unsolved female disappearance in Travis County since 2022: at least eight bodies recovered from Lady Bird Lake, Boggy Creek, and Waller Creek. The eerie pattern has its own hashtag: #AustinCreekKiller. Brianna’s phone pinging from water’s edge lit that fuse all over again.
Attorney Tony Buzbee, flanked by Stephanie at a December 9 press conference, didn’t mince words: “APD dismissed a mother’s terror because it didn’t fit their neat little ‘drunk girl fell’ story. That phone didn’t walk itself to the creek. Someone put it there—same way someone wiped that balcony clean of DNA. We are treating this as homicide until someone proves otherwise.”
The three girls in apartment 1704 that night? Their stories keep shifting.
First: “We never left the living room.”
Then: “We passed out and woke up to the balcony door open.”
Now: “We don’t remember much after the tacos.”
One of them (Mia Hargrove) abruptly broke her lease and vanished to Dallas the day after the funeral.
Meanwhile, boyfriend Alex Rivera’s alibi is crumbling:
Claimed he was asleep in Laredo.
Phone records show a second device logged into his Uber Eats account pinging 4.7 miles from 21 Rio at 12:26 a.m.
Final text to Brianna at 12:27 a.m.: “Keep playing and see what happens.”
Stephanie still sleeps with Brianna’s dry, unscratched phone on the nightstand. Every night she opens Find My and stares at that frozen dot by the creek.
“That ping was someone mocking me,” she whispers. “They wanted me to think my baby was already gone… so no one would look up until it was too late.”
Austin PD insists the creek location is “inconclusive.” The Texas Rangers are now involved. And somewhere in the dark water of an unnamed creek, a mother’s worst nightmare is still sending its silent signal:
Find her killer.
Because Brianna never made it to the creek. But someone made sure her phone did.
