AUSTIN-Eyeglasses found near the body of a University of Texas freshman in 2016 match an unusual prescription belonging to the 20-year-old man accused in her death, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
Prosecutor Guillermo Gonzalez also listed items that authorities said belonged to the 18-year-old victim that were found at various places where police say former Texarkana resident Meechaiel Criner was staying. Those items included a black boot, a laptop, a duffel bag, school work and the book "All the Light We Cannot See."
Criner is on trial for capital murder in death of Haruka Weiser, a dance major from Portland, Ore., who was strangled and sexually assaulted. Authorities have said Weiser was killed on campus as she walked to her dormitory after leaving a rehearsal.
Criner, a 17-year-old foster care runaway at the time of the killing, faces a sentence of life in prison if convicted.
Gonzalez said a yellow Killeen High School T-shirt left in an abandoned building near campus contained a hair that was traced to Weiser through DNA analysis. Criner, who was living in Killeen before running away to Austin about a week before Weiser's death, had been spotted by firefighters at that abandoned building.
Criner's attorney, Darla Davis, acknowledged that Criner had been living in abandoned buildings, but said that he did not kill Weiser.
Criner's arrest affidavit stated campus surveillance video showed a man thought to be Criner watching a female thought to be Weiser. As she walked passed, the affidavit stated, the man produced "what appeared to be a shiny rigid object" and followed her. The pair dropped from view as they reached the creek's bank. The man wasn't seen on video again for more than two hours.
Court records show Criner claimed he left home in Texarkana in August 2015 because his grandmother's religious beliefs demanded that teenagers his age go "make their own way in the world." Criner told police he hitchhiked and walked the 300-plus miles to Austin, according to an affidavit from a child welfare investigator.
Mary Wadley, Criner's grandmother, reported him as a runaway that month, telling authorities she needed to make the report so she wouldn't be held responsible for his absence from school, earlier reports state.
Criner's family had an "extensive history" of allegations of abuse and neglect with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, according to agency records filed in 2015 when the state asked a judge to take over his care and separate the teenager from relatives.
The slaying was the school's first on-campus homicide since former Marine Charles Whitman open fire from the top of UT's bell tower on Aug. 1, 1966, killing 14 people and wounding dozens more.