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Missing Texas Woman Found Dead Days After Her Family Says She Was Captured On Video Being Beaten Outside Bar
The body of Tiera Strand, 25, was discovered in a ditch between Temple and Waco, days after she was seen in an altercation outside a bar in Austin, 70 miles away.
A 25-year-old Texas woman who was allegedly filmed being beaten by multiple women outside an Austin, Texas bar has turned up dead.
Tiera Strand’s body was located in a ditch along the road between the towns of Temple and Waco, about 70 miles from Austin, on Friday, the Bell County Sheriff’s Department said, according to FOX 7 Austin. A passerby found her and notified authorities.
Her cause and manner of death are unknown, pending an autopsy.
Cellphone video recorded by a witness around 2 a.m. April 16 outside the Mooseknuckle Pub on Sixth Street in Austin shows the end of an altercation between Strand and several other women that began in the bar and spilled outside, her family told the outlet.
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Then, Strand's family said, their daughter stormed off down Sixth Street, leaving her shoes, purse, cellphone and car keys with her friends back at the bar, though she never arrived home. Her family reported her missing.
Later, her friends brought those belongings back to Strand's mother.
Monica Herron, Strand's mother, told CBS Austin that some of those friends were among those who could be seen fighting her daughter in the cellphone footage.
"I had hope," she said. "It's devastating, and the girls tried to make me have hope, and they were lying the whole entire time... She had no clue at the end of the night, or that morning, she would be dead, like she just had no clue of it. The friends that she was with, she trusted them and thought they had her best interest at heart."
Strand's sister, Mariah Herron, told Law & Crime that the slain woman's 6-year-old daughter does not yet know what happened to her mom.
"[The daughter] is with her grandfather - she calls her phone all the time asking for her. That's the hardest part," she told the outlet.
Strand was slated to graduate from a continuing education program to get her high school diploma in May and had been speaking to U.S. Navy recruiters about enlisting.
"She was excited about the next step of her life," Mariah Herron told Law&Crime, telling the outlet she was angry and confused about her sister's untimely death. "You're talking to her one day. You wonder where she is, the next. Days later, you have to come to the realization that she's not coming home alive."
Strand's family has launched a GoFundMe to finance the woman's cremation and burial service. They hope to put some of the money toward a private investigator to "get justice for Tiera and the mishandling of her case" and "give [them] proper answers needed on what happened from the moment she was brutally assaulted in a crowd of people up until her body was discovered."
Oxygen.com could not reach the Bell County Sheriff's Department or the Austin Police Department, which are collaborating in their investigation of Strand's death, for comment at press time.
Strand's family told CBS Austin that they believe someone knows what happened to the woman and hope they come forward.
"We want justice for her, and we want whoever did this to her to be stopped," Strand's mother told the outlet.
Jessica Williams, Strand's cousin, told the outlet that "whoever did this needs to be prosecuted, and that's that."
