20/20 - Death in the Dorms Season 1: Episode 2: Christian Aguilar

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Jealousy rears its ugly head when University of Florida freshman, Christian Aguilar, is reported missing under mysterious circumstances.  Originally Aired 1/5/23 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, 2020 listeners. This is Deborah Roberts. You're about to hear episode two of Death in the Dorms, a true crime series from ABC News Studios. This week, you'll hear the story of Christian Aguilar, an incoming first-year student at the University of Florida whose blossoming new relationship falls prey to jealousy, turning close friends to romantic rivals.

The question of, you know, who Chris truly was is a question that I think about constantly. We don't know where life was going to take him. Please, please, I beg people, come and help me. What should have been a great time of life and a great four years, it just became tragedy. You know, I want to find him. But he's still alive. I'm not going home until I find my son.

Christian has essentially gone dark. We didn't find anything. We found no evidence whatsoever. It really was just a terrible story. It was a harrowing thing that happened to our campus community. All my energy was focused on the search and finding Chris. We were feeling unsafe. The freshman has gone missing. What is being done?

Thought that was in the news, that was in the movies, but that's not the reality. The reality is that's tragedy out there and it can happen. Look, I know that every father probably says that their sons or daughters are the best, but when you were talking to Christian, you felt that he didn't have a distraction over any other thing, but you were the world at that moment. Chris was very in touch with his emotions which I think is kind of weird for somebody so young. He really truly cared for people in his life and that was something that I think about to this day.

It's something that definitely defines him. I come from a family that was not rich, not even middle class. We were a poor family. that it was not rich, not even middle class. We were a poor family. I was the first one who emigrated to this country back 35 years ago. I was 19 at that time.

Then I brought over here my wife. Christian was about to be born when she came over here to the United States. He was born here. Then Alexander two years after. I wanted Christian and Alexander to go to school, go to university, have the opportunity that we didn't have in our country. have the opportunity that we didn't have in our country. They obviously had to learn a new language, but I think of all the places they could have picked, Miami was probably the best place for them. It's a very Hispanic town. My family, mostly on my dad's side, moved here as well.

And ultimately, I think they picked a really nice place to start to raise a family. Until I was nine and Chris was about 12, we shared a room, and with that came just that brotherhood, you know, in bunk beds. Chris was definitely a comedian. He was always cracking jokes, sometimes at my expense, but that's fine.

Chris was very studious and he was very invested with school. Dural Academy was a school that from the exterior just promised everything. school that from the exterior just promised everything. The academic strive that was in that school, I think that was one of the biggest things for even my own mom to decide, like I think this is a school for you. Common theme amongst students, we all had either parents who were born in Latin America

or we were the first generation to be born in the U.S. So there was a lot of commonalities, a lot of Spanglish was being thrown around. The friends he would pick early on in middle school ended up being the same people he knew, you know, senior year towards the end of high school. Towards the end of high school, Towards the end of high school, he definitely started to develop a plan

of what he wanted to do with his life. He was a very science-oriented kid. Science, tech, engineering, and mechanics, he kind of knew he wanted to follow that path. When he started applying to college, getting into the University of Florida became his priority. Luckily, you know, he did get in. It is the number one school in Florida.

Of course, you start to realize that your son is going to be leaving. He's going to be five hours away from your house. And that's going to create some type of anxiety but it's part of life. They need to do it by themselves. I was student body vice president from 2012 to 2013. So I am a first-generation American. My parents came from Haiti and Bahamas respectively. I just remember University of Florida being really bright and sunny. There was always like a sense of people going somewhere so whether they were you know on the bus to class, they're riding their bikes if they're going to you know

the rights union to go grab lunch. There was always like a socializing aspect there. People were always kind of talking to each other. And then I think we really followed that up with our academics because we're notoriously hard to get into. Getting into UF I think is a badge of honor in Florida. And I think that there is very much a work hard, play hard culture. The University of Florida has reputation as a party school.

You did a lot of social activity. On University Avenue, which we call Midtown, the University of Florida has a robust Greek life, a lot of fraternity and sorority activity, football, even if you don't care about football. Like, football dominates UF's culture during the fall. I remember one of my first stories for the Alligator was whether local churches were going to try

to make Tim Tebow a saint. No joke, that's how important it is. So for me being a freshman at UF was a huge learning curve to you know have the confidence to you know try and make friends and understand cultures that are really really different from yours, especially if you come from a place where, you know, everyone looks like you, speaks like you. It can be a really, really difficult transition. So having like a community is one of the best ways for you to kind of get some grounding.

He was studying biomedical engineering and that he wanted to help people that, for example, if they lost a hand or a foot, that he was going to be able to create something to make their life a lot better. A lot of people go into college and that's the first time in your life when you're on your own.

You honestly couldn't imagine the pressure put on Chris. He was the first to go to college in our family. During that time, Christian let us know that he was going out with Erica. Erica Freeman was in the friend group that Chris had at the Ryle Academy. Chris and Erica began dating just kind of getting to know each other as more than friends. I can remember her just being a really nice girl, soft-spoken, shy. I mean she wasn't loud like I was back then. Everyone knew that Christian

was gonna go to University of Florida. Erica ended up going to the community college near the University of Florida. Erica was going to Santa Fe College but she was trying to get to UF. They were starting to go out. Claudia and myself both liked Erica and we did like that she came from Doral Academy and she was a good kid. If you have somebody there that you know from your past it makes the journey so much more easier. It made sense why they found each other. On a clean break, can I get a clean slate? I think he was living his dream life with a school.

For the first time, he felt that everything fall into place. And then somebody came in and blew it out. This is day five of the search. What a wild confession, if true. Defying a criminal victim of medical treatment. That was on a Friday, at 9 o'clock in the morning. I received a phone call, and it was my wife on the phone. She told me that Erika just called her. Christian didn't go to sleep in his room

and that he was missing for almost eight hours already. And he says he's not answering, so I stopped talking to my wife. I immediately called his number. It went to voice message. Then I keep calling him. He didn't answer. Christian always answered. So that got us more worried. I decided, okay, I'm gonna take Alexander, Claudia, and I'm heading to Gainesville. To withdraw me from school midday without any reason was kind of, you know, out of his nature. By the time I got to him, he just broke down. He was mumbling, crying. I couldn't really understand.

But he just said something happened to Chris. We picked up my mom and just headed straight from Doral to Gainesville. who have survived animal attacks, natural disasters, and deadly parasites alike. Hear how a triathlete is attacked by a shark while training and manages to escape after being pulled underwater. And how a hiker in Alaska survives a 1,000-pound moose attack after the animal crushes her limbs. I Was Prey features audio from hit shows like This Came Out of Me, Nature's Deadliest, and Still Alive, and Monsters Inside Me. Listen to I Was Prey wherever you get your podcasts. I got a telephone call from my lieutenant at Gainesville Police Department. Asked me to respond to assist University Police Department

who was working a missing person report. My name's Randy Roberts. Worked for the Gainesville Police Department in 2012 as a detective in a major crime unit. The University of Florida, they have a very large campus, tens of thousands of students. So they have their own police department. When I got there, I talked with their detectives who

said that two people, Erica Fryman and Pedro Bravo, came into the University of Florida Police Department to report Christian Aguilar missing. I found out that Erica Fryman was Christian Aguilar's girlfriend. Pedro Bravo was a lifelong friend. They were all from the Miami area. One of Chris's friends after Owl Academy was Pedro Bravo. They met, I believe, around middle school.

They kicked it off pretty well to start, and they had just been friends since. He originally started at a school in Miami and then transferred into the community college we have in Gainesville called Santa Fe, where Erica was. My understanding from talking to UPD officers was that having interviewed both Erica and Pedro, they both explained that they were in a relationship

but had broken up in high school. I heard about Pedro and Erica breaking up. The breakup to me, I was like, okay, they broke up. That's kind of sad. No mention of it was ever said after that. They both explained that the day before, Christian was going to meet Pedro at a location there on campus.

They were gonna go get lunch. They were together that evening, and Pedro last saw Christian near Northwest 13th Street, close to the city limits. Christian near Northwest 13th Street, close to the city limits. Erica relayed that Christian was supposed to come over that night, the 20th, and never showed up. She was very distraught about it. She started calling friends and asking about him, tried to call on his phone.

Kept going to voicemail. At some point during the middle of the night, she called Pedro Bravo to see if he'd heard from Christian, and she told Pedro she was going to the police, and he volunteered to go with her. My name is Brian Kramer. I am the executive director of the state attorney's office for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida.

Now that Christian is missing, UF has things they're going to start doing to try and locate him. The first of which is that they have a campus-wide network. Anytime a student logs in, they can tell that they've logged in and where they were when they logged in. They log in and he isn't there. The next sort of steps that they're going to take is they pull the student's class schedule and residency information and they're dispatching officers to go to the class and go to the dorm.

Find the dorm, they go to the dorm. He obviously is not there. They check the class and he's not there. I was driving, you know, and I received this phone call from the university telling us that Pedro and Erica was reporting my son missing. So you're driving and you're trying to make sense of all this. Your head is spinning. Honestly, nobody knew anything. All this, you had his spinning. Honestly, nobody knew anything.

The sense we were getting from the police department at the time was he's a college kid in a college town and he didn't show up one night. He might've had one too many to drink. I had already asked for assistance from the Gainesville Police Department Major Crime Unit to send more detectives because we were going to need to do a search. UF sends out these security alerts every time something happens on or near campus. When Christian went missing, the reporter, the crime reporter Chris Alcantara, was at a friend's house.

And he got the alert. He spoke with his editor and said that it was important enough that we needed to put up a brief right away. We did not want to wait for the next day's paper. We wanted to put it on our website so we could tweet it out ASAP. The article is really focused on the result of, hey, we've got to find this guy. We've got to find him as soon as possible because he may be sick, he may be hurt. As I'm reading through the Alligator article, that's where I first read that a student had actually gone missing. And I also realized that Doral is not that far from where I went to school.

And so I was just like, oh, this is someone very familiar to me and being from South Florida, being first generation. I was like, oh, I know his parents are probably like really worried. And like in my role as vice president, the onus was on me to say, okay, well, like how can we make sure that whatever search efforts start going on that we are able to support that as a student government.

I began tasking other detectives with doing certain things. One of those is to interview Erica Fryman. And then I had called for Detective Matt Geckel because Christian had a phone, and we were trying to get a ping gun on his telephone to find the whereabouts of that phone. My name is Matt Geckel. I was a detective and digital forensics examiner with the Gainesville Police Department.

September 21st, 2012, I was sitting in my cubicle and Detective Roberts was rounding up a few people that could go help with this missing persons investigation that was being reported over at the university. investigation that was being reported over at the university. At this point, we're gathering information. We're trying to find out where this Christian might be. While I'm looking at phone records, Detective Roberts was going to interview Pedro. I went and introduced myself, according to Pedro, the day before him and Christian drove together out to Best Buy and bought a CD. And then they drove to a couple other locations.

At some point they got into a discussion where Pedro told him that he felt suicidal. I wanted him to stop bugging me about, like, me complaining about suicide, and not like he thinks it's the wrong idea. And I know he was just being really supportive. At that point, Pedro said that they got into an argument. And then Christian said, look me out. Pedro said he dropped him off and left. Pedro went home.

He took some sleeping medication. It was on his laptop. He said he fell asleep. I hadn't heard from him since. We got to University of Florida, to the police department. It's a five-hour drive. I met it in three hours and a half. We were instructed to go there

to formalize the missing person report. We were talking to a bunch of different detectives and police officers who were questioning us, questioning everybody they could, and giving them as much information about Chris as we could to maybe help track down where he was. While I was trying to interview Mr. Bravo, a couple other people went out

to do a search of Pedro Bravo's vehicle. During the consensual search of Bravo's vehicle, they were looking for anything that would help them to understand either what has happened to Chris or where Chris is. They find in the car the receipt from a McDonald's restaurant where Pedro Bravo was the night before in the middle of the night.

They've already heard a version of the events where Pedro Bravo's putting himself out his apartment and sleeping, but now they've seen this receipt, and it shows that he's at that McDonald's in the middle of the night purchasing a meal. This McDonald's receipt showed a of the night, purchasing a meal. This McDonald's receipt showed timeframe of 1254 in the morning. And it contradicted the information

that Pedro had given me about the timeframe. I was able to go back and confront him with that information. We need to be really clear about this thing. I understand. I understand. You told me you were asleep. Oh, I wasn't asleep.

You checked your phone. You went back to sleep. You woke up at 3 something in the morning and your life was... I woke up at 3 something but the phone fell to 4. And then all of a sudden, you know, I called, I don about 1-something in the morning. You got 1-something in the morning at 1 to McDonald's in your car and bought something. Am I going to see your face at McDonald's on Martha Road at 1-something in the morning? No, probably not. Once I confronted him with the receipt and actually showed it to him,

he admitted that, okay, Christian didn't ask to get out of the car. He made him get out of the car. So he hit him in the nose and made him get out of his car. The more I talked to him, the more everything changed. It wasn't just me pushing him out of the car. It was like, push him out of the car. Then I got out of the car. Then I kept punching him.

And I didn't, like, continue to punch him. I can see that he was okay, but he was not going to get up for an exemption. So I didn't get out of my car and left. The police explained that, you know, Pedro Bravo said that it was a fight. Why? Why this happen? That got us more worried, and I said,

I'm going to start searching right now and with my family. So we were thinking, okay, where we start? First of all, it's too big. You don't know, I don't know this city. I didn't grow up over here. I don't know anything. So we went looking in the place that Pedro Bravo indicated that they had the fight. When I was driving, we informed our good friend with the news of Christian disappearance. He sent a colleague down here to find out and interview us. And that was presented that night on the news. Come, help me. Help for myself. You know, I want to find him.

He's still alive. I'm not going home until I find my son. So if I think about the first day that he went missing, it was more so like, why aren't they able to find him? I know that sometimes freshmen can get overwhelmed. They don't tell people, but this seems like a little bit more than that. Christian's family started a private Facebook group. We were given a lot of information through them, through there. His background was so recognizable to mine

that I could only imagine how his parents were feeling knowing that he was missing. While we were at University Police Department, once Pedro started looking and sounding as though he knew a lot more information about the case, we'd ask him for consent to search his telephone. I was asked to extract the data from Pedro's phone. We got the court order to the phone company to provide a record of his phone calls.

One of the other things that we're able to get with this court order is the towers that he connects to during these phone calls. So it'll give us a general vicinity of his locations at the time of these calls. All right. Shortly after Detective Geckle started matching things up with the two telephones, he found out that the phones were pinging off a cell tower at the same locations, up until Chris Nagular's phone was turned off. We kind of have a better picture now of your times and where you're at.

But it also brings into a lot of question. 403, you're up here. All right. Your phone's down here at 559. So that tells us that you're right in this area for two hours. All right, what we want to know is what's going on during those two hours.

Well, me and Chris were talking. Finding out new stuff that you haven't talked to me about before. But I did tell you I was in that area. His statements were kind of crumbling under the face of the evidence that we were rapidly uncovering. And I didn't tell you... You didn't tell me that you left there and went somewhere and sat for... I didn't sat for two hours.

I just stayed there for a while. And you didn't tell me that you pulled over and y'all talked somewhere and you're... We didn't pull over and talk somewhere. But you were in that area for two hours. Where were you for two hours? At that place, Walmart. I was able to pretty clearly put him in the Walmart parking lot, which he admitted to being in.

And then we were able to effectively trace the route that he took from the Walmart parking lot back to his apartment. I'm figuring out from records, around 8 o'clock that night, his phone is still not very far from his house. It's now right near the interstate, I-75 and Archer Road, which is one of our main roads here in Gainesville. Then suddenly, his phone goes off the network. His cellular signal cuts off, and at that point we have no further idea of where Pedro may have gone.

During the interview, Pedro made some suicidal statements, some indications that he might want to harm himself. At that point Pedro was Baker Acted which is a mandatory mental health hold. In Florida there's a law called the Baker Act which if you believe that a person is a threat to himself or others, they can be taken in for involuntary examination for mental health for up to 72 hours. So I took him to the mental health facility. He had to at least be examined by a mental health professional to make sure he wasn't a danger to himself. by a mental health professional to make sure he wasn't a danger to himself. The first night, we all stayed in the woods walking all that night.

Screaming and yelling and calling Christian's name. Trying to find him. Six o'clock came and we saw the first volunteer. They came and we continued with them. We started asking people in English, Spanish, French, whatever they can be for every culture, come and help. Because Christian was a student, and because we were a student-focused newspaper, we wanted to keep it top of mind for all of the readers

and also everybody in the community. The alligator was the point of conversation and saying, well, did you read the alligator today? Like, what are they seeing is kind of like the next steps. They were really motivated in saying he's new here. Like that means he really needs to have more support. Teachers, parents, friends, students that didn't even know Christian were definitely involved into finding him. Erica throughout the search, she was by our sides the whole time.

And you could see that she was as scared and as confused as the rest of us. None of us knew him personally, but he was one of us. So it was like very quickly a community event and it wasn't only the Gainesville community that was participating in the search, it was all of Florida. First it was people on foot, then it was GPD horses, then it was GPD horses and dogs, then it was not just GPD it was also other law enforcement organizations. The university was trying to be proactive and saying like, this is a lot for anyone to deal with, especially if you're going out on the ground

and you're doing the type of search efforts alongside like the police. Like you are under a lot of stress while also still being a student. People are going to classes, going and doing their searches, coming back home sleeping and kind of starting all that all over. So UF was providing like mental health counseling as that search was still going on. During that time, I met for the first time Randy Roberts. At the beginning, he couldn't provide to me a lot of the details that was going on in the case, or all the information.

He just said, well, we have a case over here where your son is missing. We're looking for him, but the chances, the more the time progress, it's going to be very tiny that we're going to find him alive. It was devastating. For the first time I felt like, oh my God, something bad really happened. I don't have no more tears right now, but the pain is in my chest.

We had volunteers from all over the place searching. At the same time, I contacted on-call state attorney who laid everything that we had against Pedro. And they said that criminal charges could be filed for leaving an injured crime victim. I was able to contact the mental health facility and tell them, this guy has a warrant. I was concerned that Pedro may disappear without us knowing where to find him.

So as soon as we had a criminal charge that we could charge, we went ahead and did it. For me at that moment, I knew that it was all play because he was charged, but we didn't know to what extent. Even though I did the initial extraction that night from Pedro's phone, really digging into the file system of that phone subsequently is where I found the meat

of what I think really helped us break part of this investigation. And that was, in particular, one log. This log had the battery percentage, it has app usage, and whether or not it's being charged, it's all in one log. This log had the battery percentage, it has app usage and whether or not it's being charged, it's all in one file. This was important because during these interviews, Pedro told Randy that his phone had died,

you know, during the night, that he had gone home to charge it. So looking into this log, I'm finding that his phone didn't die. And then I could also see that he was placing in an airplane mode. He's trying to hide his activity. They also used the data on his phone to trace his route throughout the county and they then went along that route and stopped at every business

and asked if they had surveillance video. So we have this gap from about 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. where Pedro's phone is not showing up on his service provider's records. When I compared this to the battery log that we had previously found, I was able to see a significant drop in battery life between about 11 p.m. and midnight.

Also, we're able to see that on the day that Christian goes missing, Pedro uses his flashlight app for about 43 minutes. Why in the middle of the night you need to have your flashlight app on for 40 minutes? Most likely to do something to Christian. Law enforcement obtained a search warrant for Pedro Bravo's apartment. Inside the apartment, they found receipts where he had purchased a shovel. They found deep within multiple enclosed suitcases in Pedro Bravo's closet, Christian Aguilar's backpack.

In the backpack was Christian Aguilar's wallet, all of his identification, his credit cards. At that point, whatever hope there may have been that this wasn't a homicide was clearly not. his credit cards. At that point, whatever hope there may have been that this wasn't a homicide was clearly dashed. And wherever Chris was, the things that he would have needed to continue in this life, he did not have with him. They also found journals that had writings that pertained

to Pedro Bravo's obsession with Erica Freeman. Perhaps most importantly, they contained a written plan as to how he was going to get Erica Freeman back as his girlfriend. And part of that plan is killing and getting rid of the body of Christian Aguilar. The news and the press, they were trying to paint this whole love triangle, which is completely misleading. It was not the truth.

And the truth was completely different. that the truth was completely different. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs weird i don't remember saying that

part visit dejauden.com care and get insurance that's really big on care did i mention that we care So after we'd found some journals, we brought Erica back in. They interviewed her, and she was able to relay more about the relationship. So I understand that you and Pedro were dating all through high school. Yes. Basically. She was able to give us a history of what had happened. So junior or senior year, basically?

A little bit of sophomore year. OK. I started seeing problems in December of last year. He would ignore me at some point, and he would blow me off. Or it would be like 10.50 at night, or it was already dark, and he would leave me off or it would be like 10 50 at night or it was already dark and he would leave me at the mall and i'd be alone and it was simple things but they would kept adding up i was getting like depressed because of it i was like you know how

how what am i doing wrong that's making him doing all these things as high school was coming to an end er Erica makes the decision to separate from Pedro Bravo. And tells him, the nature of our relationship is not healthy or positive, and I don't really want to even remain friends with you because I just don't think it's going to be healthy. After I did break up with him, he was very possessive. Like, he was very like, I want this.

It was kind of like, I don't care what you, what you're feeling right now so i was staying away from him so when erica arrives in gainesville she reconnects with christian at an event that they both end up at we always had a really close relationship like he considered me my like a best friend okay And that ends up sparking a relationship between the two of them. That's when you and Christian both kind of acknowledged, hey, there's something between us? Yeah, it's that I had a feeling

that there was something about it. While this is going on, Bravo is spending the summer pining away about Erica and wondering how he can get her back. Bravo is spending the summer pining away about Erika and wondering how he can get her back. What Erika doesn't know and what Christian doesn't know is that Pedro is getting information from other people that this relationship is happening. He ultimately makes a decision that she knows nothing about.

He abandons his full-ride scholarship to the University in Miami and decides to enroll at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida. It's not until around the beginning of September that he makes his presence known to her. All right, now when did he get here in Gainesville? To be honest, I don't know. I wasn't expecting him.

Yeah, I wasn't really expecting this to even happen. So he does this in a way that it's kind of like, hey, I'm here, I wanna try and be friends. Him reaching out to Christian didn't seem that strange to me at the use. He wanted to meet up with Christian because he was depressed about his school situation. He wanted to speak with Christian because Christian's his friend. So from Erika and Christian's side, Pedro's asking for this meeting to ostensibly discuss his depression.

That of course is all subterfuge and a lie. He knows good and well what's going on, and he has already made the decision about what he's going to do, and he's effectuated that plan to kill Christian Aguilar. Well, the information that Erica relayed was completely different than what Pedro told. So it added a lot of fuel to the fire. We were on the right track as far as what happened and who may have been responsible

for it. The student population at UF was shaken. As the details started to come out was a search warrant for his vehicle. So we secured his vehicle, had it towed to secure storage. During a full forensic analysis of the car, they find duct tape and samples from the carpet that contained Christian Aguilar's DNA. They were able to obtain a Gatorade bottle that contained a mixture of Gatorade and diphenhydramine, which is a sleeping agent. We believe that he was trying to get Christian

to drink this stuff to make him drowsy or something before he committed the crime. Along with samples of the floor mats that will contain Christian's DNA and a mixture of blood and fluid from his lungs, the evidence was sufficient at that point to determine that Christian Aguilar was dead. I remember the police sat us down in a room. And I think at that point we were so focused on the search,

we hadn't had any time to really process anything else. And police told us that they were gonna charge Pedro with murder. In that moment, I think that's when it all felt real. That's the very first time that I think I just, I think that broke me for a bit. Finally, we all took a moment to just grieve. The Gainesville Police Department has charged Pedro Bravo

with the murder of Christian Aguilar. So when we found out that the reason Christian was missing was because of his friend Pedro, it made me so so so so sad for Christian's family because again you trust that the environment your child is going to be in is going to be great and you try to make sure that they have community there. You don't expect that community to also be the ones to bring them harm. No, I told my wife and my son, I'm not leaving Gainesville until I don't find Christian. And then one day, I made my wife pray with me with something that was the most difficult prayer that I have done in my life, that we gonna find Christian, dead or alive. And she goes, no I'm not gonna pray like that, alive. And I say, no we're gonna accept whatever God has for us and we must. And she prayed with me that day.

All right, it is October 12, 2012. It's approximately 3.05 PM. What time did y'all get out here today? We got out here this morning looking for places to hunt, checking stands and cutting some jasmine vine. There were two individuals who were in the woods. They smelled the odor of decomposition. I said, I smell something over here.

Either there's a giant rattlesnake or an alligator or something's dead around here. And he walked over there towards me, and he could smell it too. When they found the source of the odor, they noticed that it was a human body. I talked to Randy Roberts and he says, we found a body but we are in the process of identifying it. It looks like it's your son. And they showed me one of the things that as a father you don't want to see, a photograph. It's a shoe.

And I knew that was Christian. We as a family believe that Christian has been found and our prayers have been heard. And we're going to be having the honor to take Christian back home and have his funeral. There was just an outpouring of sadness at the University of Florida. We wrote a story about a candlelight vigil. It's interesting because the quotes in the story are from people talking about how they wish that they'd known him. There are other freshmen who are saying, like, he sounded like a really great guy.

Like, he sounds just like somebody I'd be friends with, which I think is another terrible layer to this. Like, UF didn't get to know Christian. I attended the vigil. It was solemn. We need to be able to understand that this is hard for his family, but also celebrate that he was with us

and that we consider him like family as well. 22 days without eating properly, sleeping properly with the stress that I have, I collapsed when I borrowed my son. And I got what they call post-traumatic stress. They started giving me medicine. And I was going to a new bottle, going to the trial. I don't think anybody in the family or any of our friends even knew how to prepare for the trial. Pedro maintains that he's not guilty. He entered a plea of not guilty.

We were obviously worried and anxious hearing some stories about people who, you know, get let off with murder. We didn't want Chris's case to be one of those cases. The person who did this came my walk away. It's a weird situation to go from a three-week search and then a two-year period of going through several court dates and then finding the trial. This was the moment where we can close this chapter if it's done right.

We want justice and we'll continue to be here you you know, as many times as is needed. We all stayed for every second of the trial, no matter how tough it got. The state put up dozens of witnesses. The defense put up one, Pedro. You agree with me that you're the last person who was seen with Chris when he was alive? Yes. After two weeks of trial, the jury received the case. There were nine counts. They included murder, kidnapping, and poisoning.

Finally, the jury came back and gave their verdict. The defendant is guilty of first degree murder. Pedro Bravo was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was a pain that is unbearable for any family to take. The victory of giving life in prison without the possibility of parole is fair. Do I hate Pedro? No, I have. Going through the process of trying to forget him, but not yet. I haven't heard from him or his family saying,

you know, I'm sorry. They still believe that they can fool the rest of the people by saying, no, he's innocent. My son was not killed by a ghost. He was killed by Pedro Brown. My son was not killed by a ghost. He was killed by Pedro Brown. We did get a sense of relief once the verdict was read. Almost a sense of that a chapter in this very long book is finally complete. Once the trial ended, my parents and I began to help other families or people who were

going through similar situations. We created a foundation for Christian in his memory. The focus of Search and Rescue Dogs, which played a huge role in the search for Chris. I have two dogs that are trained for search and rescue, and we have participated in successful and unsuccessful searches. You know, something like this can be changed to love instead of hate.

like this can be changed to love instead of hate. People will always remember it. The way that the community came together, not only in the search, but also in the memorials, that's a lasting impact to me. That's what stands out to me. When I think of Christian, I just think of somebody who sought out to just do something great in this world.

And he, along with people in our social academic circle, motivated even myself to be better, whatever that means. But I always worked hard because of people like Christian. Everybody in the community is in one way or another associated with the university. They care very deeply about the students. They want them to be safe. They want them to get a great education.

It hurts everyone when we lose one of these children that are so incredibly precious. The University of Florida decided that they were going to give Christian his biomedical engineer degree. The first Latin American to receive it in Florida. He graduated, so he is officially a Gator. I'll be alright This is Deborah Roberts. In 2014, a jury found Pedro Bravo guilty of the murder of Christian Aguilar. He was sentenced to life in prison. In a 2024 prison interview with ABC News, Bravo maintained his innocence, claiming that some of the evidence used against him by the

prosecution was taken out of context. Bravo's defense team requested a new trial based on one witness recanting his testimony, as well as some new evidence that may have come to light. In September of 2024, a Gainesville judge denied the request. Next week, we'll bring you an episode about a lacrosse player from the University of Virginia and a gripping investigation that zeroes in on a fellow student-athlete. Death in the Dorms was produced by ABC News Studios with the Intellectual Property Corporation and, yes, Like a River for Hulu Originals. You can find the series streaming on Hulu. And be sure to tune in to ABC Friday Nights at 9

for all new broadcast episodes of 2020. Thanks for listening.