The phrase most often associated with justice, the principle meant to anchor the system,

is innocent until proven guilty.

But for my father and three of his peers, that principle did not exist.

That's Marissa Pierce speaking about her late father, Maurice Pierce.

Pierce was one of four men originally suspected in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls,

Eliza Thomas, Amy Ayers, and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison.

They were at a I can't believe it's yogurt shop in Austin, Texas.

What did you see when you first walked into the yogurt shop?

This wholesale carnage.

Sergeant Jones was looking at the badly burned bodies of four teenage girls

who have been bound and gagged and shot in the head. The yogurt shop had been set on fire to cover

the killer's tracks. The case has for years become known as the yogurt shop murders.

Nearly 35 years later, all four men were declared innocent and exonerated after the

Austin Police Department tied another man to the crimes. We now have evidence linking a specific

individual to this case, Robert Eugene Brasher's. And now the city of Austin has made an offer of $35 million to be split

amongst the wrongfully accused men, including the family of Maurice Pierce, who died before

this settlement was reached. It's blood money for us. He died for this money, so really it was never about the money

for us. It's about the reform and the changes that need to happen, not only in Austin, but apparently

across the country. In the end, this is a story about eight victims, the four girls who were

killed at the yogurt shop, and the four boys who were

wrongfully accused of killing them. What I think we need to remember is that over all these years,

as terrible as it was for Sarah, Jennifer, Amy, and Eliza's families, the four boys and their families were hounded and treated as pariahs.

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