The mother of the Louisiana State University student who was fatally struck by a car after allegedly surviving a rape earlier this year has revealed their final text exchange – including the harrowing moment she “knew something terrible happened.”
Madison Brooks’ mom, Ashely Baustert, shared that she exchanged messages with her daughter just hours before she was hit by a car in the early hours of Jan. 15 on Burbank Drive in Baton Rouge.
“‘I love you!!!” Brooks, 19, wrote in a message at 11:38 p.m. on Jan. 14, Baustert told Fox News Digital.
Baustert said that her daughter also sent her a picture of her and the son of one of her sorority sisters at Reggie’s bar.
She said that when she learned hours later that her daughter was mowed down on a busy intersection, she “immediately knew that foul play was involved.”
“I knew something terrible happened. Based on the circumstances of how she was hit, where she was, the time and her being alone.”
When the teen’s loved ones gathered at the hospital to say their goodbyes, Baustert’s mother, Mandy LeBlanc, and her brother went to Reggie’s to pick up Brooks’ phone.
“We were like, there’s no way Madi put herself at three in the morning on the parkway in that neighborhood without her phone,” Baustret explained.
A subsequent investigation into the incident confirmed the family’s worst fears: Between texting her mother before midnight and her deadly accident, Brooks got into a vehicle with four young men, whom she allegedly asked for a ride home.
At the time of her death, Fox News said, Brooks’ blood-alcohol content was .319%, which is almost four times the legal limit to drive.
The men – Kaivon Deondre Washington, 18, Everett Lee, 28, Casen Carver, 18, and Desmond Carter, 17 – turned themselves in to police in the days after Brooks’ death. All four have since been accused of raping Brooks before shoving her onto the side of the parkway.
In an initial police interview, Carver said that Brooks and Carter met at Reggie’s. Carver alleged that Carter “asked the victim five times if she wanted to have sex with him” and Brooks gave “verbal consent.”
Both Carter and Carver have been indicted on first- and third-degree rape charges.
Lee and Washington are awaiting indictment, and have been booked on principle to third-degree rape and third-degree rape, respectively, Fox said.
Washington has also been accused of sexually assaulting a woman at Reggie’s last August.
The four suspects maintain that the sex was consensual. In late January, their defense teams presented a brief clip of Brooks getting out of the group’s car, which they argued proved that the mass communications student had not been raped or willfully abandoned.
Baustert’s attorney shot down the video, saying that its content was “hurtful and shameful” to Brooks’ family.
“I had to take time to cry, I cried all day long,” Baustert told Fox of the first weeks after her daughter’s death.
She also recalled Brooks’ last day at home, when she packed up some of her things for the spring semester before going to a friend’s birthday party.
“I kissed her like I always did, and said, ‘I love you so much. I’ll see you on Sunday,’” Baustert said of their last interaction.
Baustert, LeBlanc, and her best friend Jenny Reimold traveled to New York this week to celebrate what would have been Brooks’ 20th birthday on May 7.
The trio made a special stop in Times Square to check out a billboard for the Madison Brooks Foundation, the non-profit the family started following Brooks’ untimely death.
The 10-second slideshow featured beaming pictures of Brooks alongside pink backdrops of the foundation’s goals, which included promoting young peoples’ safety and spreading awareness about organ donation.
Brooks’ heart valves and kidney were donated after her death, Baustert said.
She said that as she grapples with her daughter’s death, it feels like “she’s with me all the time.”
“Now, it’s about picking up where Madi left off,” she said.