The Murder of Haruka Weiser

Who Was Haruka Weiser

Haruka Weiser was 18 years old when she attended the University of Texas in Austin. She was a freshman at the school where she studied and participated in dance while attending on a full scholarship for dance. She was the oldest child of Thomas Weiser and Yasuyo Tsunemine. Haruka grew up in Oregon, around the Portland area. Thomas works as an epidemiologist with the Portland Area Indian Health Service, and Yasuyo a medical social worker, focusing on patients and families that are undergoing dialysis.

Haruka had two siblings, a younger brother, Noboru who goes by Nobu, and a younger sister, Naomi. The family had lived in Beaverton, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, for several years. They’re a close knit family who are always there for each other, and Naomi says she and her sister were best friends.

Haruka was a graduate of the Arts & Communications Magnet Academy in Beaverton where she was able to pursue her passion for dance from a young age. It was in school that she met many of her friends who all remember how passionate she was about dance, but more so about her family and friends. In the time following Haruka’s death, her family was grieving and in mourning, and in an effort to draw the media attention off the family, a group of Haruka’s friends met with news organizations to talk about Haruka and how they would remember her. The Weiser’s were grateful and praised their daughter’s friend for speaking out, even though they were also hurting during that difficult time.

Haruka’s friends reminisced with reporters about the kind of person Haruka was growing up and how they had first met her. One talked about their first day in 6th grade when the teacher had them all sitting at their desks and writing in their notebooks. She looked around, and everyone had their heads down, diligently doing their assignment, but one girl was sitting sideways in her desk, with her notebook in her lap. Her friend said that she looked like she was just deep in thought. She immediately thought to herself, I don’t know who that is, but I’m going to get to know her.

A friend who attended class with her said that she was in awe of Haruka’s work ethic. Whether they were in class, warming up, rehearsing for a recital, or at a recital itself, Haruka approached every movement as if it was the only thing that mattered. Her focus and commitment to honing her craft impressed everyone around her. Haruka was extremely passionate about everything she did, but incredibly humble at the same time. Her friends all say that she was the string that held their group together. She didn’t hesitate to badger them about going out on pre-dawn walks / runs to watch the sun rise.

While dance was her passion, Haruka had developed a recent interest in the medical field. So much so that she was planning on taking a summer internship at a hospital (I believe it was in Arizona). She had told some friends that she was excited because there was a chance that she would be able to go into operating rooms and witness surgeries, which was what she was most interested in. When she was asked about what she wanted to focus on while in school, she started to tell people that she was doing dance and pre-med.

As mentioned before, Haruka got a full scholarship for dance to the University of Texas. The university has been around since the late 1800s and has a total undergraduate enrollment around 40 thousand students. The school typically ranks high on lists ranking national colleges and universities, ranking 32nd on the 2024 list put together by US News. It’s divided into 13 schools and colleges, with the biggest being for Liberal Arts, but they also offer business, engineering, and nursing programs which are all highly ranked as well.
Since the school has such a large and reputable liberal arts program, it was a perfect fit for Haruka to attend. She loved campus life, living in her dorm. It also didn’t hurt that Austin is known for its vibrant arts scene, boasting plenty of art galleries, studios, and exhibitions of various mediums. It won’t come as a surprise that while she attended the school, Haruka didn’t have a problem finding and making new friends.

Haruka was going to be part of a dance production being put on by the school; she and fellow students had been practicing and rehearsing leading up to opening night.

On Sunday, April 3rd in 2016 she went to a rehearsal that was held in the evening. When she got out, she called her roommate at 9:30 PM to let her know that she was on her way back to their room. She left the F. Loren Drama Building and headed to Prather Hall where her dorm was. She went along the usual path she took, but Haruka never made it back to their room. The following morning, she missed an early class, and the UT Police Department (UTPD) was called about a missing person around 11:00 AM on April 4th. Friends told them that Haruka was last seen wearing a long sleeve black mock turtleneck, black leggings, and some brown Doc Marten shoes, size small. Her roommate told them that she left carrying a small blue duffle bag. Inside the bag she had her Macbook, iPhone, a jacket, and some books for school.

UTPD officers initially searched the nearby area but found no signs. They went through their procedures when situations like this arise, which is to talk to her friends in the area and family to see if anyone knows anything. With it being a college campus, it’s not uncommon for a student to be reported missing when they aren’t actually missing. Sometimes they are sleeping at a friend’s house, or might have had a little too much to drink and are sleeping it off, or maybe they just don’t want to talk to anyone and aren’t answering their phone. But after going through all of their standard procedures, they knew very quickly that this situation was different.

On Tuesday, April 5th, UTPD began to expand their search area to include more areas where Haruka was known to travel between classes and back and forth to her dorm. While searching one of these areas near Waller Creek, they found the body of a young woman who had obvious trauma to her body. The UTPD notified the Austin Police Homicide Unit that a body of similar size and stature to Haruka had been located, and she was later identified as Haruka. An autopsy was performed where it was noted that she had suffered obvious trauma. It was later released to the public that the perpetrator had raped and sexually assaulted Haruka before she was strangled to death. She had also been struck by a blunt object, leaving a skull fracture on the left side of her head. Authorities waited to make any kind of public identification until Haruka’s family could be notified.

Students at the school were alerted that a body had been found near the alumni center on campus, and it was being investigated as a homicide. On April 7th, Gregory Fenves, the University President, sent another email out to the students. By this time, the Austin PD had spoken with Haruka’s parents, and Fenves released her identity to the university. In the email, he expressed condolences to the Weiser family and friends of Haruka, while also letting the student body know that Austin PD was working diligently to find the person responsible.

The investigation into Haruka’s murder moved quickly. The campus had security cameras, and investigators immediately started to look through any and all footage they could get their hands on. As they began to watch the video, they looked into the routes that Haruka took, particularly the one that she would have likely taken that night.

At one point, around 9:20 PM, they noticed a black male riding a bike around the area. He didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, and was seen on various cameras going back and forth. He approached a parked van that was in an area that looks like it was used as a loading dock and checked to see if the doors were unlocked. He was riding what they thought was a pink or red women’s mountain bike, wearing a black jacket with an orange shirt underneath it. He appeared to have on gray pants and red or orange running shoes. He was also carrying a big backpack as he rode. He looked to be around six feet tall with an athletic build and wore glasses. From all accounts, he looked like any other student in the area.

That’s another thing, the area where this occurred wasn’t a desolate or deserted area. Investigators observed other students coming and going as well as vehicles driving through. It wasn’t a hustling and bustling area at that time of night, but there was a little activity.

After the man had walked around the van for a bit, he got back on his bike and exited the view of the cameras. Then, at 9:38 PM, he reappeared and went back to the van he was looking at earlier. As he got back, another figure can be seen walking into the area, it was a female dressed in all black looking down at her phone as she walked towards the alumni center, this was Haruka. As she passed, the man on the bike watched her intently. Once she was past him, he put the kickstand on his bike down and got off while reaching his left hand into the back of his pants and pulling out what appeared to investigators to be a shiny, rigid object. The man followed behind Haruka as she walked over a nearby bridge and down the sidewalk that went behind the alumni center and along the west bank of Waller Creek.

At 11:47 PM, the man can be seen again on security footage of a different area. He was walking down a sidewalk along a road pushing the bike he was riding earlier. As he walked, he appeared to have a slight limp, and appeared to have some kind of injury to his left leg. In the footage, as he walked, he can be seen carrying another bag besides the backpack he had earlier, a small duffle bag. He was last seen walking northbound and off camera.

On April 7th, the authorities released portions of the footage of the man to the media in hopes that someone would see it and recognize him. A little after 4:00 PM, the homicide unit received a call from the Captain of the Austin Fire Department. He told them that they had received a call on the morning of April 4th about a fire in a building on Medical Arts Street, which was the same direction that the man was last seen heading towards.

The captain continued to tell them that the building was an abandoned building, and when the firefighters got there, they found a young black man inside burning things. They put the fire out and called Austin Police because the man told them that he was 17 years old and homeless. The fire department took possession of the bike he had for safe keeping while the police took him to LifeWorks, a local homeless shelter that offers services and assistance to youths and young adults in the Austin area, because he had no place to stay. The officers seized the items the man had, which included several bags and a backpack. He was taken to the shelter and given a room. The interaction between the young man and the police was recorded on the cameras inside of the police car. That young man’s name is Meechaiel Criner.

Upon receiving this call from the Fire Captain, investigators immediately went to look through the footage from the patrol car that responded to the call from the fire department. When they watched the video, they noted that Criner was wearing the same style and color of pants and shoes that they saw in the surveillance footage from earlier. Criner also matched the description they were able to come up with from the earlier footage as well.

They looked through the items that Criner had in his possession, one of which was a small blue duffle bag. They took a photo and showed it to Haruka’s friends and roommates; they all recognized it as the one that Haruka carried with her, and it was the one she had the night she was murdered. One of them was at the rehearsal that night with Haruka, and confirmed that she saw her with that bag and that Haruka left class that night with it. Investigators went back to where the fire had been to look around. They found a brown Doc Marten shoe, size small, a notebook that had been partially burned and contained college level coursework, and a black jacket that was identical to the one that Haruka had been seen wearing.

Around 5:20 PM, they went to LifeWorks and found Criner. He was detained for suspected tampering with evidence and transported to the Austin Police Homicide Unit. Officers spoke with the LIfeworks staff and learned which room that Criner was assigned, which he was sharing with another individual. In the room was a large beige locker that was assigned to hold his belongings, with a combination lock on it. Officers secured the room while they waited for a search warrant to be drawn up and issued.

A judge reviewed the info and signed off on the search warrant, allowing officers to begin their search. They found shoes that were identical to the ones the man wore on the surveillance footage. They also found items that matched evidence they found at the crime scene. They located a MacBook in the room which had a sticker that was related to the city of Portland. Haruka’s family had previously informed them that she had a sticker like this on her computer.

The arrest warrant states that after all these items were discovered, along with witness statements and the surveillance footage, there was sufficient probable cause to support the charge of murder against Criner for knowingly and intentionally causing the death of Haruka Weiser.

On April 8th, the police announced that Criner was arrested for Haruka’s murder, and on June 8th, 2016, a Travis County grand jury indicted Criner on a capital murder charge. Criner’s indictment accused him of multiple charges, including sexual assault, attempted kidnapping, and robbery; he was held on a million dollar bond. In September of 2016, Judge David Wahlberg set the official trial date for March 27, 2017.

As you might imagine the time leading up to the trial and the trial itself were emotionally intense for everyone involved.

Criner was 17 years old at the time of Haruka’s murder. He had a troubled and tumultuous upbringing, but as we’ve said in the past, countless people have troubled or down right shitty childhoods and do not go on to kill anyone; while there’s never an excuse to murder someone, Criner’s childhood certainly isn’t a valid one in this case. Criner’s family has what was described as an “extensive history” with the TX Dept. of Family and Protective Services. When he was two years old, he was taken out of the custody of his mother and placed to live with his grandmother. Over the years, the state had investigated several allegations of abuse and neglect. In 2011, Criner’s mother told him that she wanted to regain custody of him, but he refused to go with her. Upon his refusal, she threatened him according to documents, saying that she would “make sure you go to foster care.”

When Criner turned 17, he was forced to leave his grandmother’s home due to her religious beliefs. In her religion / beliefs, at 17 years old, children are supposed to leave home and make their own way in the world. Criner said that in March he hitchhiked and walked the 300 miles from Texarkana, where his grandmother lived, to Austin. Later that same month, his grandmother reported him as a runaway. She told authorities she was Criner’s guardian and that the report needed to be made so that she wasn’t held responsible when he wasn’t in school, according to Texarkana police.

As the trial date loomed, getting closer and closer, the defense and prosecution were both waiting for DNA evidence to be processed and returned. This was due to the fact that the APD Forensics lab was shut down in June of 2016 because the staff was undertrained. The Texas Dept of Public Safety (DPS) then started to process DNA samples for the Police Department, but they were only doing 20 or so samples a month. This caused delays in several court cases in the area, including Criner’s. The delays in the DNA testing coupled with scheduling conflicts for the trial resulted in Judge Wahlberg rescheduling the trial for July 9th, 2018.

Pretrial hearings were taking place in June of 2018, in which the focus was on whether or not the DNA evidence that everything was delayed for would even be allowed in the trial. – Get ready, we’re going to get a little sciency here… The DPS adopted a new software for processing DNA evidence, STRmix, in March of 2016. In the pretrial hearing, the analyst who analyzed the samples from the scene testified to the validity of the results. STRmix results have been brought into question over the past few years across the country, and in this case, since there were samples that contained mixed DNA, STRmix was used to determine the probability that Criner’s DNA was present in the samples. The state explained that DPS used the STRMix computer program to determine the odds of a particular genotype being in as evidence of a DNA profile (Criners). Criner’s attorneys argued that with STRmix, the “machine” is relied upon too heavily to make decisions and draw conclusions.

The main pieces of evidence in question were swabs from Haruka’s thigh and glasses. The first did not show evidence of Criner’s DNA. A second swab was analyzed by hand and came up inconclusive because the amounts of genetic material were too low. But when that swab was analyzed using STRmix, the machine said analysts couldn’t rule out the possibility that the DNA was Criner’s. It was explained that humans are generally good at identifying individual DNA profiles, but it gets more complicated when more than one person’s DNA is mixed in, which is why more law enforcement departments are looking to genetic probability companies for help, which is what STRmix does.

The defense argued that the software isn’t up to the level it should be when you are using the results to determine whether or not someone is going to spend the rest of their life in prison, or face a death sentence. They said that because STRmix isn’t an open source program, how the algorithm works is kept behind lock and key, but in cases like this, it is vitally important for everyone to know how it draws the conclusions that it does, and that no one knows if there are errors in the programming that can cause the software to err one way or the other regarding whether or not someone’s DNA matches. They said that as a whole, too much was being ceded to machines and a human being should be able to explain it so everyone could understand it, or it shouldn’t be allowed to be included.

But, basically, when they tested the DNA using the “old” method, Criner couldn’t be identified by the dna evidence, but with STRmix, the software reported that it’s 192,000 times more likely that the DNA found on the swabs belonged to Haruka and Criner than to Haruka and anyone else. Jody Koehler was the analyst who tested the samples, and after running them through STRmix, she changed her conclusion after doing so. She testified that she did not follow the DPS multistep standard operating procedure when she made this change. The DPS was also called upon to produce some of the documentation from the testing, which would have supported Koehler’s conclusion, but they were unable to.

After weighing arguments from both sides, Judge Walberg ruled that the DNA evidence could not be included in the trial due to the different outcomes, Koehler’s not following procedure, and the DPS being unable to produce the documentation when asked.

The trial started with the defense and prosecution giving their statements. Over the course of several days, witnesses were called for the prosecution and defense. The prosecution laid out everything they had. Even though the DNA evidence was excluded, they still felt like they had a very strong case against Criner. They called tech to testify to the validity of all of the security footage they went over, hundreds of hours worth of tape.
Friends testified to Haruka’s location the night she was murdered and said that she suddenly stopped responding to text messages around 9:40 PM the night she was murdered. Firefighters testified they reported to a call of a fire where Criner was first found before being transported to LifeWorks. The defense played the dash footage of Criner at this vacant building. The responding officer said that he felt like it was odd that someone who was homeless could afford the MacBook they found among Criner’s belongings.

There were some eye glasses found at the crime scene, which the prosecution said belonged to Criner. They had gone to him before with the glasses from the scene to have the prescription checked. It matched perfectly with the glasses that Criner got from him. This might not seem like much because there have to be countless people with the same various prescriptions, but Criner has a very unique astigmatism in one of his eyes, which required a unique prescription. He testified that the glasses found at the scene match the unique prescription and frames that had been sold to Criner.

There was one piece of DNA evidence that was included in the trial. There was a hair on the neon green shirt collected from the trash bin outside the vacant building. DNA analysts said results showed the hair could belong to Weiser. Analysts said they could exclude 99.89 percent of the North American population, including Criner and his relatives, from having that particular mitochondrial DNA type.

Criner took the stand in his own defense. Before he did, he was reminded that by doing so, he was giving up his right to remain silent. On the stand he was asked about his upbringing and homelife growing up, which we discussed earlier. When asked about how he felt about the trial, he said that “I don’t like my odds,” referring to the chance of him being found innocent. Writings he had done were read in court which depicted violence and sexual assault against women. When his attorney asked him if he killed Haruka, he said he did not. He said he was staying in a vacant Medical Arts building around campus when everything happened. He testified that he found the bike and bags with various bags that day, including the blue bag with one shoe and the laptop in it.

On the seventh day of the trial, there were four hours of closing statements followed by four hours of jury deliberations. The jury was dismissed at 7PM and they would reconvene the following morning at 8AM.

Just after 2PM on July 20th, they came back with a unanimous verdict of guilty.

Criner was sentenced to life in prison, but he will be eligible for parole after 40 years. Because he was 17 years old at the time of the murder, the death penalty was not on the table.

The defense has filed a motion for a new trial, alleging that jury misconduct might have played a role in the verdict. After the trial, one of the jurors reported that she felt coerced and bullied into agreeing to the decision to find Criner guilty. Another reported that during deliberations, several people had questions about some of the evidence, but at no point did it seem like anyone was adamant that Criner was innocent. He said that when someone brought up that he might be innocent, they walked through the process and evaluated all the evidence together.

But, the defense withdrew the claim of jury misconduct and said that new evidence had been found which warranted a new trial. They said that there was a tablet computer with evidence that wasn’t found before.

The contents of this tablet had been processed onto a flash drive that the District Attorney’s office used. Matt Danner, a forensic examiner who was called by the defense after the verdict, found a chunk of data missing on that flash drive and used the computer chip from the tablet to find more information. Using the chip, he found a missing activity log that was not on the flash drive and used by the state in trial.

He said that Criner’s tablet was open and powered on between 7:15 p.m. and 9:33 p.m. on April 3, 2016. He also found that the power button was hit at least four times between 8:45 and 8:46 p.m. Danner testified that while it is possible the power button on the tablet could have been pushed by jostling around in a backpack, he believes it is most likely the button was pushed by a human. Judge Wahlberg said essentially that the evidence of a button press doesn’t outweigh all of the evidence that was presented in the trial.

The defense argued that proving that Criner was on an open tablet pushing a button at the time when the suspect is seen on surveillance video shows Criner is not the suspect. The state objected, saying this was not new evidence and that the suspect goes back and forth out of the video. Ultimately, Judge Wahlberg agreed with the prosecution that this new evidence didn’t warrant a new trial. After he announced this in court, Criner leaned to his lawyer and said, “Well, that went fast.”

Haruka’s father spoke to the courtroom when Criner was originally sentenced. He said:

“I promise you this, the Texas State Board of Paroles and Pardons will need to build a new room to hold all the letters that I and everyone that loves Haruka will be writing to make sure that your twisted fantasies remain just that.”