Tiera Strand (Photos courtesy of family)
The body of a 25-year-old missing mother who disappeared after family members say she was seen being attacked in a cellphone video by several women outside a bar in downtown Austin, Texas, was found in a roadside ditch 70 miles away.
A passerby found the body of Tiera Strand on Friday morning in a ditch off a road in Bell County, north of Temple, about 70 miles north of where she had been reported missing five days earlier, according to a news release from the Bell County Sheriff’s Department. Officials said an autopsy would determine how she died.
Mariah Herron, her sister, told Law&Crime on Saturday she’s angry, sad and confused. She said her sister leaves behind a 6-year-old daughter who does not know her mother died.
“She is with her grandfather,” Herron said. “She calls her phone all the time asking for her. That’s the hardest part.”
Herron said Strand hoped to graduate from a continuing education program to get her high school diploma in May, and she had been talking to a recruiter about going into the U.S. Navy.
“She was excited about the next step of her life,” she said, describing a wave of emotions. “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.”
She said the family is waiting to get her body back medical examiner’s office and are planning her funeral. The family also plans to hire a private detective to go through the details of her case, hoping to learn more about the moments they say she was brutally assaulted in a crowd in downtown Austin before disappearing on April 16 around 2 a.m. and the time her body was found.
The Bell County Sheriff’s Department said it was conducting a joint investigation with the Austin Police Department’s homicide unit but released no further details on Saturday.
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