Nancy Grace sat down with the mother of late LSU sophomore Madison Brooks in a Fox Nation special on the LSU student, during which she retraced the horrifying moments she experienced after finding out her daughter was hospitalized and in critical condition after being left for dead on the side of a busy Louisiana highway.
"It was just utter shock," Brooks' mom Ashley Baustert told Grace. The hospital that cared for her daughter, who was in critical condition, called her twice on the night the horrific tragedy unfolded, but she was asleep and didn't hear the phone until early the next morning.
Terrified, she threw on gym clothes and raced to the hospital where she discovered a devastating truth.
"They told me she was brain-dead," she said.
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"They said it just like that?" Grace asked.
"Yes, they told me that she was unresponsive. I asked, ‘What are her chances? Maybe a miracle could happen. We’re going to pray for a miracle.' I just started screaming. I fell to the ground…"
Baustert said she noticed four nurses surrounding her daughter when she entered the room. "She was so swollen… it really didn't even look like her [but] I could tell it was her. I could not believe that my 19-year-old was in this position. How did this happen?"
She told Grace she knew that she was going to get answers, and vowed to her daughter she would uncover the truth.
"I told her, and I promised her that I would fight to find out the truth on [sic] what really happened because she would have never put herself in that situation."
Baustert made the difficult decision to let her daughter go. After waiting for Madison's father to travel up from Florida, their daughter's organs were donated to people in need.
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The details of the night Brooks stumbled onto a busy four-lane highway in Baton Rouge and was fatally struck by a car after she was allegedly raped and released from her attackers' vehicle on the side of the road are slowly coming together.
Her blood alcohol level was reportedly .319% at the time – four times the legal level to drive.
In The Pelican State, going to bars at age 18 is legal, though consuming alcohol underage is not. Her credit card records show she spent less than $20 on drinks at a local hotspot called Reggie's, but the amount she consumed was enough to leave her so intoxicated she was seen falling from her barstool, Grace said.
Kerry Miller, attorney for Brooks' mom Ashley Baustert, said the bartenders gave her most of the drinks she consumed.
"She goes to a bar, gets in, knows a number of the bartenders at the bar and is served large quantities of alcohol," Kerry Miller, attorney for Baustert said, adding later, "We know she had way too much to drink. Things had gotten out of control…"
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Surveillance footage captured the night of her death showed her running across the street toward four men she had met earlier that night.
Two of them allegedly raped Brooks - though Ronald Haley, defense attorney for Everett Lee and Kaivon Washington, says both encounters were consensual.
Grace, previewing the Fox Nation special Tuesday on "Fox & Friends," called out similarities between the case and the Natalee Holloway disappearance still shrouded in mystery.
"They over-served her at the bar. Reminds me a little bit of [the] Natalee Holloway situation. She gets into a car with people she doesn't really know that well. She ends up being horribly sex[ually] assaulted," she told anchor Steve Doocy, before calling for the young men to be charged.
"They [her attackers] push her out on the highway, and she gets run over and killed. I want felony murder charges on all of those young men, and that has not happened yet."
Over 100 days after her daughter's death, it all still feels fresh for Baustert.
"How can I live without her? How am I going to go on, as a mother, without her? That was the main question because she wasn't just my daughter, she was my best friend…" she said. "She was the first person I would call in the morning and the last person I would call at night."
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