At 4:07 p.m. on December 5, 2025, the Austin Police Department walked back every word they said this morning.

What was ruled suicide at 11 a.m. is now officially an open homicide investigation.

The bombshell came in a terse, three-minute press conference outside headquarters. Detective Robert Marshall, the same man who stood at the podium six hours earlier declaring “no evidence of foul play,” returned looking like he hadn’t slept in days.

“New forensic evidence has come to light that contradicts our initial assessment,” he said, voice flat. “Effective immediately, the death of Brianna Marie Aguilera is being investigated as a homicide. We are actively pursuing persons of interest.”

He refused to take questions. But sources inside the investigation leaked the two pieces of evidence that flipped the case in a heartbeat.

The balcony railing DNA This morning APD claimed only Brianna’s prints and her three friends’ were on the glass. This afternoon, the lab rushed a second, deeper swab from the underside of the railing (an area initially overlooked because it was “below line of sight”). They found male DNA belonging to someone who was never disclosed as being on that balcony: a 22-year-old University of Texas lacrosse player named Jake Harlan, the same host whose party Brianna attended.
The missing 43 seconds of Ring footage The 17th-floor hallway camera that faces the elevator had a 43-second gap between 12:41:11 and 12:41:54 a.m. This morning it was written off as “routine cloud upload lag.” This afternoon, technicians discovered the footage wasn’t lagging; it was manually deleted from the Ring cloud account at 12:53 a.m. (six minutes after Brianna hit the ground) by a device logged in as “J_Harlan21.”

That same account disabled the balcony motion sensor at 12:38 a.m. and re-enabled it at 12:49 a.m., two minutes after impact.

Jake Harlan has not been seen since December 2. His black 2024 Tahoe was captured on toll readers heading north on I-35 at 3:14 a.m. on December 3, destination unknown. His phone has been off since.

Stephanie Rodriguez, Brianna’s mother, was on the steps of APD headquarters when the reversal hit the wires. She dropped to her knees, clutching the sequin cowboy hat, and screamed one sentence that every microphone caught:

“I told you my baby didn’t jump!”

Attorney Tony Buzbee, standing beside her, didn’t waste time. Within 30 minutes he filed an emergency motion demanding preservation of all 21 Rio security servers and a federal monitor on the investigation. “Six hours ago they called a grieving mother crazy,” he told the mob of cameras. “Now they admit they missed a killer’s DNA on the exact spot she went over. That’s not incompetence. That’s something darker.”

Inside sources say the turning point came from an unlikely place: Brianna’s Apple Watch.

The device, cracked but functional, recorded a sudden altitude drop of 187 feet in 3.7 seconds (consistent with a fall), but also captured a 911-second burst of 142 beats-per-minute heart rate at 12:42:03 a.m., followed by a violent lateral acceleration spike (like a hard shove) 0.8 seconds before the free-fall began.

In plain English: Brianna didn’t climb the railing. Someone put hands on her.

The three girlfriends who were on the balcony with her (Emily, Taylor, and Sophia) have all retained counsel and are no longer cooperating. One of them, according to a search warrant filed tonight, googled “how long DNA stays on glass in cold weather” at 1:11 a.m. on November 29.

As the sun set over Austin, Texas A&M students poured onto Simpson Drill Field by the thousands, many still wearing the sequin cowboy hats from last week’s vigil. But tonight the candles spelled a new message across the grass:

JUSTICE FOR BRIANNA WE BELIEVED HER MOM

Somewhere out there, Jake Harlan is running.

Somewhere in the Travis County evidence locker, Brianna’s cracked phone still has one unsent text glowing in the outgoing queue:

help he won’t let me leave the balcony

It finally delivered tonight, when APD forced a remote iCloud push.

And for the first time since that November night, Brianna got through.