Transcript of Murder at the U New

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The shooting happened right down Southwest 77th Avenue here in the parking lot of Pata's apartment building. And tonight, Miami Dade police are searching for his killer.

Yeah, Brian Pata was a defensive star in the Miami Hurricanes.

He was going to be in the NFL in just a few months.

I said, What do you mean they killed him? Like, Why? Why would somebody do this? I was just coming home. I had just gotten home from work. And as I answered the phone, it was my mom. And my mom shared with me, You haven't heard? Sydney is dead. I just paused. And started screaming. When Brian Pata's mother got to the scene and she was told that her son had been killed, it was devastating. It looked like one of those scenes you'd see in a movie of a mother just wailing, and it was heartbreak. Give me my baby. It was a scream of pain that was just coming from her soul, her gut. I was like, Oh, my God, this is real. She hugged me, Ece. Sydney is gone. Sydney is gone. I was like, Oh, my. I started to cry so bad. My son's very good son. Never have a problem with nobody. You know? Oh, my God.

It's You're watching the rawest of emotions. You're watching someone deal with a tragedy in real-time. This is a very private emotional moment, but it's being broadcast on live TV. And little did we know in that moment how much more devastating it would become.

Life has always been a challenge and obstacles of test of who I am and what I will become. My name is Brian Patty, and this is my story. We're at the stadium right now. It's game time.

Brian Pata was larger than life.

What's up, you all? His aura, it just stuck out. He always gets everybody to gravitate towards him. Feel me? Check my biceps out. We got those cameras the year before. Come here, though. See what's to the camera though. As soon as he got it, everybody was walking around with him. Everybody always taking videos. It's a true encapsulation of who this person was at that age, living in Miami, being a star football player. Take off your shirt. Brian Zee was always filming. He had to be in front of the cameras. He had to be recording him dancing. If you When you look at him, it may be a little intimidating, but... He was a great person. He had a great heart, great spirit. His smile could just light up the room when he came in. He made everybody laugh. He was just... He had a soft heart. I really love people. I could see this huge guy that looks this football player. But for me, I look past that. I knew this soft side of him. That's the brother I remember.

Brian Pata came from a big family. He had an even larger extended family. When you consider the football team, the people in his life and community who looked up to him.

My mom, she's from Haiti. Like most parents, to be successful in this country, you have the dream, the American dream, that come in and work hard. It was It was quite a struggle for my mom. A single parent home. They try to make ends meet. It's a total of nine children. So there were six boys and three girls. Brian was the last of the nine. He was never call Brian at home. He never called him Brian. Everybody outside knew of him as Brian, but we knew him as Sydney.

Brian petted a lot of people in Miami didn't have it easy. They moved around a lot, spent a lot of time in Little Haiti and the north Miami.

Brian and his brothers, they were sports crazy. For them, it was a way to get away from some of the troubles in the neighborhoods that they lived in.

Sports was for us pretty much our only way to get to college, to afford college. That's part of the reason why we worked so hard at it. When I first met Brian, I was just like, Wow, this guy's unbelievable talent. Brian physically was so gifted in high school. You knew this was somebody who could play at a high level in college.

Brian was heavily recruited out of high school, but he knew he wanted to stay in this region.

He wanted to stay in this area, but it and he came down to being close to his mom.

There was only one school for Brian, and that was the University of Miami.

He swarmed and brought down Brian Pata. He has a motor that will not stop. Miami hurricanes in the early 2000s, hands down, was the best team of all time.

Brian Pata was high-performing player on a team that was highly regarded.

A lot of people think he would have had a long, substantial career in the NFL.

With Brian, his biggest hope was to make it to the NFL, be as successful as it possibly can be in order for him to take care of his family. He was a big baby. He'll be sitting in the locker and he'll just be laughing. What are you laughing at? What are you laughing at? And he'll be listening to a message his mom just left for him. And she'll be like, Boy, I dream you today. And He used to make me laugh, too. She babied him. I mean, she loved him so much, you know what I mean? And we all did. Brian would be on the phone with his mom. Every single day they talked, he always made sure he checked in with her.

This trajectory that Brian Pata was on was not his alone. His mother, she was on this journey with him.

What are you making? Oh, man. I'm going to eat a little fish. Fish.

He was going to experience the American dream, which is to have a better life than your parents had and to share that with them. And that whole trajectory was just derailed.

Can I have a day of police on fire? Would you be in emergency? Hello. Yeah. Hello. What happened there?

Somebody got shot. The guy was on the ground. I don't know where He's bleeding from me. He's on the ground, man.

When police arrive, they start courting off the area. At some point, Miami Dade police realizes that they need an assistant state's attorney's office representative to be there. They phoned Herbert Walker, who was on call that night.

By the time I got to the scene, you could already see people beginning to gather around.

The night of the shooting, there was just a lot of police lights, people in the area, everybody wanting to find out what happened. And everybody calling each other, what's going on what happened.

After the initial incident, I remember meeting with friends and family members just to gather information. My experience as a prosecutor, time is of the essence, and the clock is ticking.

In the hours after Brian's murder, the Miami football team didn't know if this was an attack on Brian, or if this was going to be an attack on multiple players.

That summer, another teammate got shot a couple months prior to Brian Pattern. Ambushed, coming out of his house. I was scared of myself, and nobody knows what happened. I thought somebody was trying to kill me, too.

This is, murder at the U. I'm Paula Levine.

I got started on this in the spring of 2018. We were just gathering sound. At some point, we realized we had enough sound and enough of a story to make it a true podcast.

The podcast itself didn't really come to fruition until the story seemed a little more complete.

From 30430 Podcasts. We had a killer amongst us. Murder at the U.

The podcast is the result of eight years of investigative reporting by ESPN.

I would say we've interviewed more than 100 people. We've gathered more than 5,000 police documents. Anything we've been able to get our hands on has helped us in our investigation to this point.

A star player on a major college football team, murdered near campus just a few months shy of the NFL draft.

Brian Pata was an outstanding defensive lineman with UM and was being talked about as an NFL prospect until about 7: 30 tonight when he was shot and killed in the parking lot of his apartment building. Give me my Get me my baby. A woman believed to be Pata's mother, wearing a UM jersey with his number on it, collapsed as she rushed to the scene. Other family and friends were overcome by the news.

In the weeks leading up to Brian Pata's death, his family had noticed some things that made them think that Brian thought something bad was going to happen to him.

I last saw Brian that Sunday on the fourth. I cooked a huge meal for him. My mom and I, he came over, and he just seemed just really mellow, quiet. He just spaced out. And his head was down the whole time, kept rubbing his hair, and his hair was in front of his face, just kept rubbing his head like this. His spirit was awful. He don't know. He couldn't explain it. And I remember him leaving, and he said, Thank you, sis, and gave me a big hug. It seemed like he was so far away from me, but he was literally right there. And I was like, Okay, I love you. I'll see you soon. And not knowing that would be my last conversation with him.

November seventh, 2006, pretty average day for Brian. He and his teammate, Eric Moncourt, decide that they're going to go register for spring classes.

We went over, we registered for classes, and then we went over and got something to eat. After that, we went back to the heck of an athletic facility. We had a great day of practice.

After practice, we were told by one of Brian's teammates, Chris Zellner, that he was in the locker room.

There was a call that Chris Zellner overheard where it seemed like But he was threatening Brian.

Just happened to be just me and Brian left in the locker room, and then he received a phone call. It started off as a normal call, and then it got started getting heated. Brian started to say, You, if you want to come see me, come see me. You know where the fuck I'm at? Fuck you, man. They hung up. I looked over. I didn't want to be too nosy, and I was just like, Hey, man, are you good? You straight? That was the angriest I've ever seen Brian powder, ever.

After Practice is done. Brian gets in his car, he's heading home. He sees some of the younger teammates. He offers them a ride home and drops them off.

Brian arrives home around 6: 57. He's on the phone with his another Fentanyl, and he says to him, I'm going to let you go now. I just pulled in.

Brian pulls into the parking lot in front of his apartment complex and exits his car. Within, police estimate, probably two minutes of that, he gets shot in the head.

Brian's girlfriend, Jada Brody, says she heard a bang and people arguing. Jada goes outside to investigate She sees Brian Pata laying face down on a sidewalk, feet from his car. She thinks he's joking because he's a jokester and realizes that there's a pool of blood around his head.

I don't even have There's police cars, fire rescue everywhere.

They basically gave me the quick overview of what had happened and told me that Mr. Pata was found face down on the sidewalk. I saw a large black male just about 20 feet from the entrance to his apartment.

There appeared to be an entrance wound to the back of the head, and it was a single shot.

Based upon the fact that we didn't find any shell casings, it was suspected that it would have been a smaller caliber revolver-style handgun. It was clearly not done as a robbery. They found Brian's wallet. There were nine $100 bills still in it. His cell phone, no one had stolen anything.

To me, this might have been more in the line of a hit, a targeted assassination, if you will.

All through the night, the police canvased the colony apartments, knocking on every door, but they turned up no eyewitness. There was no security camera footage. There was no obvious trace of the killer other than the bullet that had pierced Brian's skull.

It was the worst feeling I ever had in my whole life. As an older brother, you always want to protect your younger brothers, and I felt like I wasn't there to protect him. It was awful. Awful.

Who could have wanted a rising football star with a promising future dead? Detectives began asking questions night, asking Brian's family and teammates if he had any enemies, if he'd been in any fights, if he was worried for his safety. Turns out the answer to all of those questions was yes.

The University of Miami. I can't wait to get my hands on you.

This is Miami. There's a dangerous, sexy, cool reputation in this town.

This is where I am, Papa. You're going to enter the end of the game.

If you are a college football player at the University of Miami- It's game time.

I'm serious.

You are going to get caught up in that fast living lifestyle very quickly.

Did you notice your boy? He got tainted. Big pattern. Just showing you all my cars and whatnot. Good done, baby. That was Brian. Yeah, he He was that flashy. Check out on my inside. He check me out. He was very flashy. Back in the days, I still do all the UM players cars. Cade Brown. This is DJ Thon. Brian came to the shop. This is what he wanted right here. This is his favorite color right here. Candy apple gold, that serve look.

He loved that.

Brian's love of cars came during a time when a lot of kids his age were doing a lot of the same thing. He had a great joy of buying old classic cars, fixing them up, and then flipping them on the internet.

Just showing you all my work, what I could do with my cars. Clean down good.

He enjoyed that aspect of taking something, making it beautiful, and then trying to get a buck off of it.

That was one of the things that Brian wanted to do once he got successful and got paid in the pros is open up a car shop. Jamming to that Rick Ross. Going that way to my apartment now. Us One going south. In 2006, MTV Cribs was a show that was still popular. On this episode of MTV Cribs, NFL Edition. Welcome MTV Cribs. I thought, well, this would be really cool if we could start doing this with local athletes and make it a local story. I was working for the Miami Harold. I was a high school/ College football writer. And because of my long relationship with Brian Potter, I just felt like he was the perfect candidate because he was one of those top ranked players who didn't feel like he was too big for you. He wanted to help tell his story. I attached a microphone with a tape recorder to Brian's shirt, and we recorded it. What up, you all? This is my crib. I'm Brian Potter, University of Miami, San Diego. What's up? If you walk in, this is a townhouse, two bedroom, two and a half bathroom. It's a living room. We got not that much stuff, but it's decent for athletes.

I broke a TV, I spill juice on it. So no TV there, but a cable box. Check out the kitchen. We keep it clean. Probably got one dish in here, one cup. Going upstairs to the room. This is my room. It's all right. It's not spectacular or nothing like that, but this is a little collage of me and my girl.

Jader Brody was, at the time of Brian's death, his girlfriend. They had been together for exactly a year. She had moved into his apartment earlier that summer.

I introduced Brian to his girlfriend, Jader. My name is Dave Howell, and I was friends and teammates Brian Petter. We were at an on-campus party, and he ended up noticing her from afar. And he was just like, Who's that? I was like, Oh, I know her. I went to high school with her. Her name is Jada. He was just like, Can you hook us up? And I introduced him. That's Jada? Yeah. Brian was not some serial dater and all that. He was a typical college student. And I think at that point, he just settled down a little bit, wanted to take this relationship a little more serious with Jada. They had their fights. They had their love. They were just a typical college couple. The day that he was killed, the night before, they were celebrating their one year anniversary. So it seemed like they were on cloud nine to me.

According to what she told detectives, Jada was in the apartment cleaning out her dog's kennel. She told police that she heard an argument outside, possibly Brian's voice, and went to see what was going on. She saw Brian lying on the ground. At first, she thought he was playing a prank. Then she saw blood around his head. Jada said she ran back upstairs to call 911. You never know who might be a possible suspect And at that point, everybody's a suspect. One of the things that police looked into, and that we looked into as well, were some conflicts that Brian apparently had with Jada's family. The police found that in the spring of 2006, Jada told her father, Jerry, that Brian had broken up with her because he suspected her of cheating on him. Jerry told police that he then called Brian to warn him not to speak disrespectfully about his daughter. The conversation with Jerry led detectives to Jada's his twin brother, Jerome. Jerome Brodie had been in and out of jail for various offenses, and his father said that Jerome would have killed anyone who messed with the family.

You might have a situation where a brother, a sibling, might feel strongly enough that he might take matters into his own hands.

About a month after Brian's murder, Jada Brodie's brother, Jerome Brodie, ends up getting arrested in Boston. And as part of the arrest, police find some guns in a vehicle. Miami Dade gets this information that they have those guns tested to see if they're a match to the bullet found in Brian's skull.

Miami Dade police flew up to Boston, tried to speak with Jerome. He was unwilling to speak, but those guns that Jerome had didn't match any possibility to Brian.

We did our due diligence and We couldn't place him in the area.

Jada's twin brother and other members of her family were deemed not to be involved.

The police started going down all of these different rabbit holes, but they actually were starting to look at someone much closer to Brian. Hello. Whether Brian got mixed up with the wrong girl is one of the questions that certainly the investigative team looked into.

Is there an ex-boyfriend that is upset that He left him.

Crimes of passion caused passion and action.

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Brian Pata, a defensive lineman for the Miami Huracan.

Brian Pata was shot and killed.

Brian Pata was a great leader.

A team leader. A selfless, fun-loving kid. Teachers loved him. A tragedy. We missed Brian Pata.

Brian was laid to rest at the New Bath Baptist Church in Miami.

The amount of people that was coming in, I think it was like over 2,000 people. I remember a mom passing out, crying. Passed out completely. Yeah, completely passed out. A lot of our teammates was there. It was a sad day, man. It was a hard day. Seeing a lot of teammates break down and start crying. It was a really tough day for the University of Miami. Look at this moment here.

At the first game after Brian's murder, the team kneeled for a moment of prayer and silent reflection midfield with this big banner.

Brian Potter's image, the slain Hurricane teammate, a banner that fans made, and the team gathering around it at midfield. That was rough. We were just numb. You didn't feel like playing no football. You know what I mean? The teammate just got killed.

Months before Brian was murdered, one of his friends had purchased for him a suit to wear to draft day.

Brian had picked us out to wear this draft, and they had it all out. And that's when it hit me then, just looking at that, it's supposed to be the best night of his life. And this is the worst. You got to bury him in a minute.

There's an alternate universe in which this tragedy doesn't occur, where Brian Pata goes on to the NFL, and he would have been a multimillionaire. It would have been another Miami hurricanes, American dream story.

Everybody wanted to find out what happened. Just a lot of questions. Who did this? Who would have wanted to kill Brian Podta?

In the hours after Brian's murder, the Miami football team decided to bring all of the players back to the athletic center, the Hex Center, to brief them all on what had happened. The one glaring thing that people noticed was that there was one player not there.

Brian had an issue with one player on the team, and that was with Sean Jones. He didn't like him. He didn't get along. He's not a good person.

Brian Poddar's name was buzzing at that time. There was a lot of talk about his future, a lot of hype about him going into the NFL draft. Rashaun Jones was more of a background player. You didn't hear his name a whole lot.

Rashaun Jones was a safety on the football team, a defensive back, really didn't play very much. I looked at him as a cool young guy, jokester. You could tell by the way he worked on the field. He was somebody who was passionate about the game. He was a ladies' man. I mean, I knew every time I seen him, he was trying to get at the girls.

In the early days of the investigation, police came across a specific beef that Brian had with Rashaun, and it was largely over Jada Brody, Brian's girlfriend.

Prior to Brian and Jada being relationship, it was rumored that Rashaun and Jada had some form of relationship. That is what the friction that was there between Brian and Rashaun.

According to some of Brian's teammates, there would be taunting about, She's my girl. There was definite jealousy and factors there that put those two at odds over who she liked, who she was dating, and what her history was with both guys.

He just said that the guy kept trying to fight him, and so they kept getting to these little fights. In 2004, there was an incident between Rashaun and Brian that had happened on campus in one of their dorm rooms. The dorm fight, me, Brian, and Eric were walking up to Eric's room, and at that time, we saw Rashaun leaving out of the room. We were They were just confused. Why is he in there? I don't know. He said he was looking for DVDs. He was trying to apologize to me, but I really didn't want to hear it. I was just tired. I was ready to go to sleep because I had to be up in a few hours. Rashaun ends up trying to leave out of the room, and then Brian ended up punching Rashaun. And me and Eric looked at each other like, Did it really just escalate that fast? I broke it up. When Rashaun was walking out, he told Brian he might as well go ahead and clip up.

They heard Rashaun say to Brian, You better clip up, meaning that he better get a gun.

I was like, You all about to shoot each other right now? Get the out of my room. You know what I mean? I'm about to go to sleep. I'll holla at you. Rashaun Jones threatened Brian. So you never take anybody who threatened your life lightly like that. I don't I don't think that he looked at that as a threat. I mean, he never really mentioned it after. You know what I mean?

Here's what we had learned about Rashaun. Rashaun had conflicts with Brian. He would have known the hurricane's practice schedule and what time Brian would arrive home. According to the police report, there were no eyewitness to the shooting. No murder weapon was ever found, and there was no record of any physical evidence linking Rashaun to the crime. Clearly, the name Rashaun Jones came up, but it was on a list of many names that we were looking at.

Initially, police looked into a broad string of incidents involving a Miami football team, but they weren't able to make any connection to Brian's shooting. As the investigation continued and police widened their search, they realized there was a long list of people who may have wanted to harm Brian.

At one point, the police had been alerted by a a jailhouse snitch that his cellmate had allegedly confessed to him one night.

As part of vetting, the police had the informant take a polygraph. No rest as of yet as police in Miami continue their investigation. Brian Pata, senior defensive lineman for Miami, gunned down at the age of 22.

The murder of Brian Pata took on mythological proportions in this town. It was like everybody had a different theory.

We learned that Brian had a busy life. It wasn't just football and his girlfriend. He was involved in a lot of things.

The investigation at the start went in so many different directions.

There were so many different angles they were trying to go with. I felt like the police just didn't know which leads to really, truly go for.

It wasn't a limited field of suspects. You need to follow the evidence.

One of the tips that came in to the Miami Dade police was that if they wanted to find Brian Pata's killer, they needed to look for ties with the Zopound Gang. Zopound is a well-known gang in the Miami area.

They were notorious for doing crimes of great violence. Zopound was featured as one of the bad guys and one of the Will Smith, Martin Lawrence.

Bad Boys movies. Yo, dry off, sweetheart. That's Ice Pick. He said the Haitian Zopound is about to do a rep. Let's move.

There is no indication that Brian was a member of this gang, but there were members of the Zopound gang who told us that they were aware of Brian, that they knew him. The homicide detectives weren't able to bring back anything that would tie a specific action of the Zopound to this incident.

There was a lot of talk about Brian getting into fights with some pretty potentially dangerous characters. Oh, boy. It is not uncommon at all to see bad blood lead to fist being thrown in a nightclub in Miami.

A few months before Brian is killed, Brian and some of his teammates are at a club called Club Life, and they get into an altercation with some guys there who belong to a gang. There was definitely a physical confrontation. Brian's throwing punches and He's clearly involved in the fight. And as they are leaving, members of this gang are telling them, We're going to come after you for this. And one of the teammates with Brian at the time is calling Brian and telling him that someone's got to hit out on us.

At first, Brian was definitely worried about these guys. His girlfriend found him sleeping in the closet where he kept his shotgun. And I think that that was certainly a reasonable indication of concern or fear or paranoia on Brian's part.

The Club Life investigation didn't seem to go anywhere, but then a few months later, the police got another promising lead, an alleged jailhouse confession. There was a jailhouse informant. His name was Bernard Brinson. And he claimed that he was having a conversation with another inmate by the name of Emmanuel Jones. And Emmanuel Jones would end up telling him that he got paid to do a hit and that he believed that the person he got paid to do the hit on was Brian Pata.

They went and actually administered a lie detector test, and the jailhouse snitch passed the lie detector test.

Back in 2007, police had quickly ruled Emmanuel Jones out as a suspect.

There is evidence in the police records that that man had an alibi because he was in jail on November seventh, 2006.

But we discovered the police had the timeline of his arrest all wrong. That robbery took place in August 2006, but Jones wasn't actually arrested until December, a month after Brian's murder.

Miami police did not respond to our request for comment.

Years later, I was able to actually track down the alleged confessor, Emmanuel Jones, and I got him on the phone, and I was trying to bring him back to that time period in 2006. If someone were to say, Hey, you confessed to this murder, do you remember where you were in November?

I was nowhere around no murder. I don't know anything about no murder.

They wrote he had an alibi. He was in jail for stealing a dirt bike in an armed robbery.

There was all this talk of jail house confessions and tales of professional hits. All of this just swirled because there was just this this emptyness that the police couldn't fill.

You hear this person is the lead person, and next week, someone else is the lead person. When it took longer than six months. All of a sudden, you're like, What's going on?

Now, a tragedy that has no closure, no conclusion, and no answers, the murder of Brian Potter.

It takes too long to know who killed him. I don't know what to say anymore. Every day I'm talking, we try to call a detective to ask them questions. They don't want to pick up the phone. We leave them a message. They don't call back.

It feels like Miami Dade needed to do something new. Their hand was almost forced into doing something creative.

As a reporter, I try to stay out of the story. But sometimes the work you do to get the story and what you uncover changes it. That's exactly what happened here.

To my knowledge, this is the first time a police entity has ever reached out to ESPN for help with a case like this.

It's The Paradise podcast. I am your host, Ryan Michelle Bathé, with my husband, Sterling. What's up? Join us here on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+, where we'll discuss each episode with the cast and crew of Paradise. I'll be getting all the secrets from Dan Fogelman, James Marsden, Shaline Woodley, Julian Nicholson, and Sterling Calby-Brown. Paradise, the official podcast, is now streaming. And stream Paradise on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. From 30430 podcast.

That He got fired. Did you think I was that strong? Brian Pata, senior defensive lineman from Miami. Gunned down.

The key to this case, it's Brian. A hour before he died, he was on a phone arguing with somebody. This might be a hit. You want the truth. They just want a conviction.

In place of arrest.

We had a killer amongst us. Murder at the U.

Listen now.

Welcome inside Radio City Music Hall.

The 2007 NFL Draft is now open.

In April of 2007, the NFL Draft was held at Radio City Music Hall. The Chicago Bears take Greg Olson, tight end.

Miami. Seeing those guys that he knew and I'm getting picked, it was real sad to watch. Introduce yourself, man. I'm Greg Olson. How are you doing, Patty?

Greg Olson and Brian were good friends on the team. After Brian's death, Greg Olson went on to have an incredible NFL career and a long broadcast career after.

It reminds you of what could have been for Brian, the life that he could have lived.

It It wasn't entirely clear to us how this case ended up becoming a cold case. There was a ton of media attention at the time, but fell off.

The family reached a point that they were very frustrated with the police efforts to finding answers.

When you look at the police file, you see very, very little new inserts from 2010 to 2016. It was almost like nothing had been done. It's March of 2017, and the family is holding a joint press conference with Miami Dade PD. It hurt.

It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt. It's hurt.

We don't hear nothing from my son. Brian's mother turns very accusatory towards Miami Dade police.

They don't work in the case of what? Does this stand to way? I don't know how to say something that hurt me.

I think it was pressure from the family that finally prompted the Miami Dade Police Department to reach out to the media to see, Okay, look, the family wants us to do something. Let's at least make the effort to put the word out there again and see if we can generate some leads.

Maybe now, 10 years later, somebody who might have information might be an adult now. Maybe they'll do the right thing and make that one phone call that we need.

In the summer of 2017, Miami Dade Police reached out to ESPN in the hopes that we would produce a feature hoping that it might trigger something and somebody watching it. We discussed it internally and thought, Let's see if there's something more to this story than just a College Game Day piece. We're ready to jump in with both feet and then see what we can do to move the case forward, if you will.

That sounds great to me. Yeah, that sounds awesome.

We would ask lots of questions. A lot of them they couldn't answer, but a lot of them they did. What do you know, if anything, about maybe what led up to it or if there was an argument or anything?

We don't know if he had bad blood with anybody.

As of right now, we really don't have a motive.

One of the things that really drives me in an investigation is looking at, okay, the people who were supposed to be doing a good job at this, what did they do? I wanted to dig further into this.

Once we started putting in requests for actual police evidence and police files, It quickly became a little bit adversarial.

There are a lot of questions we have about witness interviews, phone records, and any other possible leads that you guys have gone down that we would love for you to share with us.

That's stuff that is, since it's still active, we can't disclose.

They did start to provide some documents, but the problem was, giant sections of them were blacked out. If we didn't get the information, we couldn't tell a complete story.

Greg Cooper and Dean Jackson are members of a cold case unit in Utah. We realized we needed some out-of-house guidance on how we had perceived Miami Dade's police work.

Their former investigator is law enforcement. When they looked at this, they agreed. There were some of these angles that the police hadn't ruled out.

There was some redaction to those reports. Without having that information, it created questions about the investigation and how far it went, how thorough it was.

One of the things that I just can't get over with this is that there were some just basic omissions and errors in this that you would not think that a police department of that size would be making. It was like, in 2006, there weren't text messages.

Did you guys look through Brian's text from what was available on the physical phone? I don't believe there was text messaging back then.

That was the old-style flip phones, push-to-top phones, or the old things that I don't believe it was texting.

By the time we went back to them a year later, we had learned a lot about Brian's life. At that point, we were asking them questions which they didn't even have answers to. We were told by Chris Zellner, Brian's teammate, that in the locker room after practice, the day of the shooting, Brian was engaged in a very heated phone call. Was that call investigated?

I don't remember that individual's name.

I don't think I personally interviewed him. Obviously, that's somebody that I would like to speak to also.

After we all got the news that Brian passed away, I immediately told the police officers, and they just like, Okay, thank you. We'll take that into consideration. And that was it. No follow-up questions, no like, Do you think you heard anything? Do you think you heard a name? Nothing like that. I never heard from them ever again. The collar that Chris Zellner had overheard is a cause for concern in that it was never identified who the collar was or what the nature of the conversation was. That should have been tracked down, identified, and interviewed.

When the police department was being reticent with us about information, that really made me curious because you wanted us to do this. You wanted this exposure. What is it that you don't want to tell us?

It appeared as though the Miami Dade police turned on the very people that they had recruited into this effort to help solve this cold case.

Espn decided that the only way to try to get an unredacted copy of the files was to sue Miami Dade police.

So we're here on the case of ESPN Inc.

Versus Miami Dade County at all. Case number 20, 502-9801.

Eventually, we were ruled against. But while on the stands, we were able to get several officers of Miami Dade to admit.

Does MDPD know who killed Brian Pata. We have a strong belief as to who is responsible for his death.

And that revelation confirmed what was previously released to us by accident in the heavily redacted police reports. In some of the initial batches of records that they gave us, they included dossiers on a lot of the people they looked into. The only cover page that had the word suspect on it was the cover page for Rashaun counts.

We knew that was important. They forgot to redact it.

That was the first indication that they were not being truthful with us.

Do you have a specific suspect in mind?

No. I mean, anybody...

We didn't have a specific suspect. The police are not required to be truthful to reporters. However, in denying they ever had a main suspect, they made us even more skeptical of their information. They had considered Rashaun Jones a suspect from the beginning.

In November of 2020, our investigative team decided that it was ready to publish something with everything that we had learned.

That photo that was featured so prominently of all the players on the field kneeling by that banner of Brian's face will look very different based on the players who are pictured in it. Place your hands back for me. It's a big place under arrest.

My mom, she still talks to him, and we help her clean the gravesite. The heartbreak of not knowing. There's not a day that my mom did not wake up. She's in tears. She'll never be the same. I remember my son every day. It's sad.

While interviewing the family We learn that every year they held a vigil on the anniversary of Brian's murder at his Gravestone.

I try to keep this case active as much as we can. Thirteen years later, you realize nothing's been really done. Somebody just kill him like this. It's not why. One day, two going to come out.

From the outside looking in, it was the case that police should have been motivated to solve quickly. But that is not what happened. Instead, weeks turned into months, which eventually turned into years, and Brian's murder remained unsolved.

In November of 2020, our investigative team decided that we'd probably take in the case as far as we could to that point. That's when the digital story came out. The family was so appreciative that Brian's name was finally being talked about again, and some pressure, it seemed, would be put back on Miami Dade police.

You may remember this case because Pata was a star football there for the University of Miami.

It's been over a decade, and the murder of Brian Pata is still unsolved.

In one of South Florida's most infamous unsolved murders, the shooting of a University of Miami, Lyman, and it remains unsolved to this day. We felt like that got the ball rolling again. It opened it up big time.

Our story was the very first time that the public had been told that Rashaun Jones, a former teammate of Brian Pata's, was the person that police were considering most likely to have killed him.

One of the theories of Brian's murder definitely revolved around his teammate, Rashaun Jones. There was pretty open conflict between the two of them.

After reading the ESPN article and then just putting this piece and this piece together to make it make sense, I started to believe that there was definitely a capability of this being Rashaun.

I received a voicemail from Enric, Brian's older brother.

Hey, Dan. Good morning. It's heating up really good. I think they're about to make an arrest soon.

Nine months after our story comes out, we get word that the Miami Dade Police Department is moving to arrest Rashaun Jones.

I believe one of the catalysts was the ESPN article that came out. I think also the state prosecutor also gets a little more aggressive in his approach towards arresting someone.

They show up at a Dollar Tree warehouse in Ocala, Florida, where he's working, and they're waiting for him when he leaves work, and he's arrested. Big place under arrest. Another exclusive tonight, the wife of a former UM football player coming to his defense after he was arrested for murder.

I heard them say, Rasha Jones, put your phone down, you're under arrest.

Rayshon Jones' wife says he She says he knows nothing about that night and doesn't know who killed Brian Pata.

He's not this person that they're trying to portray.

She says even though Jones and Pata had a history, it was resolved before his death.

He said it wasn't even at odds when Brian got killed. He's not a murderer. He's not.

An arrest in the 15-year-old cold case, the murder of a University of Miami football player.

Brian Pata was fatally shot outside his apartment back in November of 2006, and now police have arrested his former teammate, 35-year-old Rashaun Jones, and charged him with Pata's death.

I said to myself, It's about time. It's about time. My mom, she got up and she started to dance, and she started to praise God. And say, Thank you. I kept trying to say, It can't be true. Wait till it's all proven. But at that moment, I'm not going to lie, I was really upset. Look at this moment here. Brian Pata's image, the slain Hurricane teammate, a banner that fans made, and the team gathering around it at midfield.

Initially, the photo of this moment looked to us like a team united, grieving one of their own. But now, one player sticks out, Rashaun Jones. Somehow, he's made it to the front row. He's on one knee, looking down at Brian's face on the banner. Knowing the rumors that were swirling around the team at that time, that photo started to look very different to us.

When I see that photo, I just be like, wow. You know what I'm saying? It just get you chille, man. You know what I mean? It's a little scary.

So the question now is, looking at that image, are we seeing a man who is praying for his teammate or who is praying for forgiveness.

After Rashaun Jones was arrested, we were really waiting around to see what was the tipping point. What was that missing piece of the puzzle that you said you needed to make an arrest?

Were you anywhere near the scene where Brian was killed that night? I wasn't even hearing you. What if I told you there was an eyewitness that saw you leaving the scene right after?

35-year-old Rashaun Jones, a former defensive back for the Canes, was arrested in Lake City in Marion County earlier today with the help of US marshals. After Brian is killed, Rashaun had gone on to marry his high school's sweetheart, Ashenda. He has five children, and he's doing some coaching stuff. He's somewhat still involved in football, but seems to be living a pretty average life.

In August of 2021, Rashaun Jones was arrested and was subsequently interviewed and interrogated for this crime. Have you already petted him down? Yeah, we've gone through everything, pockets and stuff.

And in walks, Miami Dade, police Detective Juan Segovia, who took over this investigation from Miguel Dominguez, who retired right after our lawsuit.

How many hours did you sleep last night? I don't know, I'm not very well. Two. Okay. The approach that the detective is using at this point. It really is not accusatory. It's just an interview approach to begin with. What can you tell me about your relationship, Brian? I know we had an up and down relationship. Okay. What happened? What does that mean, up and down? We was teammates.

I guess females got involved.

So it was, I don't know, I guess, jealousy over females. I think Rashaun wants to find out how much information, what the detail is, what it is eventually that the detective has to share with him. He doesn't seem to be concerned about admitting that they've had some ups and downs.

Not yet.

Not yet because they haven't put it into a context for him to have concerns about that.

Rashaun had somewhat of a history of getting into altercations, and there was another player that would tell police that Rashaun actually pulled a gun on him.

Did you own a firearms back when you were at University of Miami? No. You never had carried? Never. Did you ever make it sound like you carried a firearms? I don't know. That was a lot going on back then. I don't remember.

If I said, No, I didn't ever say I carried a firearms.

Most likely the realization is they're trying to connect me to a weapon, a weapon that's connected to the homicide.

All of a sudden, he starts stammering.

You can see that he's thinking about that. It's He's trying to go back through the files in his memory.

On the morning of Brian's murder, Rashaun is called into the coach's office, and he's told that he's failed his drug test, which is going to lead to a suspension. He was for marijuana.

He was for marijuana, so I don't go to practice that day. When I leave out of this office, I go home.

Miami Dade pulled phone records for Rashaun Jones, which show that at 3: 00 PM on the day of the murder, Rashaun activated a new phone number. What was the reason to change your number?

Explain to me. I don't know. At the time, I felt like I was going to get a lot of backlash for my second marijuana. For me, for my from my childhood. From who? From friends, family. I know I let my family down, mother them, grandmother them.

One thing that stood out when we finally got to look at his phone records was that there were 56 calls, but there was a gap between about 6: 40 and 7: 40. And police believe Brian was shot around seven o'clock.

So when you got home, you turned up your phone? Yeah. Why did you do that? I just didn't want to be from the outside world. Okay. First, I was fussed by the way.

At the time of the shooting, police are contacted by someone who lives at the Colony Apartment Complex by the name of Paul Connor.

Paul Connor was a writing instructor at the University of Miami. On the night of the murder, Paul Connor was about to make a turn into the parking lot. He hears a pop. And seconds later, he walks by a young African-American male going in the opposite direction.

Police later showed Connor a photo lineup, and Connor identified Rashaun Jones as the man he saw that night.

What if I told you there was an eye witness that saw you leaving the scene right after? You remember that old man that you crossed with in the sidewalk there? I wasn't there. He came, I witnessed me. You were identified him leaving the scene. How when I wasn't there. He was showing six photographs. He was showing six photographs, and you were one of them, and he immediately identified you. I can't explain to you. I don't know. Just really bad luck? Really bad luck. I'm telling you, I have nothing to I didn't do with this guy murdered me. Nothing. Ain't no 15 years of telling myself I didn't do it. I ain't no trying to convince myself. Nothing. His concurrence that, Yeah, it's just bad luck. This is just bad luck, really bad luck for me. It's a lot more than bad luck. It's either fact or it's being trumped up against him.

Why would all these people lie about your son?

I just said from the... I guess from the... I used to I mean, I used to be a young and wild. So I guess that just the project that they got on me of how I was. But that ain't got nothing to do with picking up a gun, trying to kill nobody, home nobody. That's not in me.

Ashenda is brought into the interrogation area as well, and she comes to talk to Rashaun after they've interviewed him.

They said they got the eye with me. They said, People still don't know that he shot me with a gun when I was in Miami. Oh, I I threatened Brian when I was in Miami. People heard me threaten him. That's all they got it? People heard me. They ain't got no DNA.

You can't make me think my husband is a killer.

I said, Listen, you have to literally show me him standing over the body for me to believe that he killed this man. I truly thank you. It's me.

I love you.

I love you too. You got a star witness involved here identifying Rashaun as the individual responsible responsible, and it behooves the prosecution to ensure that that individual is safe and willing to participate and capable of it.

In the lead up to the trial, the prosecution had been telling the court that they had been issues with tracking down Mr. Connor. They tried his phone number, they tried his address. He was nowhere to be found. They just presumed that he was dead.

But something here just didn't seem right. I find people for a living. I just didn't believe he was dead.

Mr. Garner? Okay, Nikola.

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Das ist einfach die App, die uns versteht. Steuern erledigt? Safe. Friends Like These, the murder of Skyler Nees, is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

911, do you have an emergency? I have a 16-year-old daughter.

I can't get a hold of her. I am scared to death. We wanted to talk to Skyler's friends.

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How could you do this to your best friend? There's a darker secret that's not been said. Watch the new Hulu Original series, Friends Like These: The murder of Skyler on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. For a bundle subscribers, terms apply. Mommy kept all of these. Mommy was so happy when she got this jersey. Oh, yeah. My son. She said, My son. That's him holding it. That was her first jersey. This just tells me right here how much of a jokester he was. Oh, my God. I missed his boy. Yeah. You hear stories, or you watch a documentary, you see something like this. To think that one day that you'll be that same family wanting justice, wanting closure. And you're sitting there just waiting, waiting, waiting. This is him as a baby. It's been a roller coaster ride for all of us. We're preparing, we talk about it. Then all of a sudden it gets pushed. Then it gets pushed and it gets pushed. It's been a roller coaster ride.

If the family hadn't pushed, if there was no 2017 press conference with Jeanette Pata. If there was no involvement of ESPN, would we even be at this point? The former UM football player accused of killing a teammate charged with second-degree murder at his arraignment today, Jones has pleaded not guilty. The first substantive thing that happens in his case is a bond hearing, which is in 2022. Please come forward to the witness stand right up here. One of the most interesting things about the bond hearing was that we finally got to see for the first time, Paul Connor, the writing instructor from Miami who claimed that he saw someone matching the description of Rashaun Jones leaving the apartment complex after the shooting.

How would you describe the person that you saw, Mr. Connor?

A young African American, 6 feet to 6 foot 1 tall, approaching the gate.

What did you notice about the man in his station feature? Well, he smile at me. He had a clean set of white teeth, no gold teeth.

The bond hearing lasted a few days, and at the end of it, the judge set Rashaun's bail at $850,000. But His family couldn't come up with the portion needed for bail, so he remained in the Metro West Detention Center in Miami. Time passed, and four years after his arrest, Rashaun was still in jail waiting for a trial. I got contacted by Rashaun because another client referred him. I went to see him at the jail, and he told me a little bit about his case, about the fact that it had taken 15 years. The case did not sit right with me, and I decided that I was going to represent him.

Rashaun Jones has a fiercely passionate and dedicated defense team in his corner. Sara Alvarez is 30 years old. This is her first murder case ever.

When I came onto the case, The witness list that the state had filed was very incomplete. I realized that there was a lot left to do in terms of deposing these witnesses and also tracking down other witnesses who the state was saying they had never had contact with.

As it turned out, one witness was extremely difficult to track down.

In the summer of 2025, the state attorney's office comes to a hearing and says something that is pretty shocking, which is They can't locate their main eyewitness, which is Paul Connor. They couldn't find him. They said they had run him in all the records, databases, and we kept pushing and asking for evidence of this.

The prosecution had been telling the court that they had been in issues with tracking down Mr. Connor. They tried his phone number, they tried his address. He was nowhere to be found. They just presumed that he was dead.

As someone who does this for a living, and tracks people down, I did not believe that Paul Connor was dead, because when you die, you create a paper trail.

Paula Levine phoned one of Mr. Connor's previous coworkers. She was so concerned that she called a welfare check to be done on him.

Remember, this is a private individual just calling up the Louisville Police Department to do this.

Are you Paul?

Yeah. Paul, how are you? Yeah, I'm okay. Perfect.

All right. Thank you.

A few weeks later, producer Dan Aruda and I made a trip to Louisville to see for ourselves. We arrived at the address that both we and Miami Dade had for Connor.

Hi.

Are you Paul Connor? Yeah. Have you been contacted by anyone recently from Miami State Attorney's office at all? No. Just before the murder trial for Brian Pata is about to start, a key witness is found who police thought was dead.

It wasn't the police that discovered this key witness wasn't dead. It was ESPN. I mean, that's just wild.

2020 reached out to the Miami police with specific questions about their investigation. They did not respond to our request for comment.

All right.

So as the case finally heads to trial after all these years, all eyes are on that courtroom in Miami. Nearly 20 years after the deadly shooting of a UM football player, it's time for trial for a teammate accused of the crime.

This case got really personal for all of us. We were ready to take gloves off and throw down.

Everyone out. Everyone out. Yes, everyone out. I'm cleaning. Out. Out. Under.

So this is Courtroom 401. It's really only used for the big trials. It's the same courtroom where Ted Bundy was tried, and they knew that the media would be interested in this case. The first day where testimony is scheduled to begin, here comes had a family in force into the courtroom, his brothers and sisters, and his mom, Jeanette, who is in a wheelchair.

We've been preparing for the unknown because this is the hardest thing we've never gone through this before.

And to see them all come in and fill up two full rows in the gallery, it was powerful. They sat down, and I think they bore witness. That's the best way to put this to what they hope is justice.

The inescapable feeling here is justice delayed, is justice denied.

State of Florida versus Rashaun Jones.

State prosecutors say over the 15 or so years of this case, all evidence really pointed to the defendant. We are asking that you just pay close attention to each and every witness who testifies, because each person will provide a piece of evidence that in the end, points only to one person, the man sitting at that table over there, Rashaun Jones. So for the prosecution, this case basically comes down to the relationship between Brian, Jada, and Rashaun.

All roads did not lead to Rashaun Jones. Just because the government tells you that something is true does not make it so. Rashaun looked as he's sitting at the table, very professional. He didn't A big glance over at the family. He really kept his focus on his counsel. For 15 years, the police interview Rashaun along with other teammates and other students, but they never really treat him like a suspect. They don't bring him in for a sworn statement for 15 years after he's already been arrested for this horrible crime. I'd like to call you like to call your first for this.

In an extremely emotional moment in the courtroom, you have Dwayne Hendrix, Brian's teammate, former roommate, testifying about the moment when he saw his friend lying motionless in front of their apartment. I noticed Brian on the ground, so I hopped out of the car, and I was like, Yo, stop playing. He had a puddle of blood behind his head. That's when it hit me. It was Well, he wasn't playing, and he wasn't in the game anymore.

Did you call anyone from his family?

I tell people to this day, that was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. It was to call that. To call his mom and say that her youngest is dead.

When the prosecutor first started showing some of the photos from the crime scene and some of the photos of Brian's body, it was a really emotional moment for the family. I mean, they were leaning forward, they were grabbing tissue, some of them turned their heads away. It clearly had an effect them.

Dave Howell, Brian's teammate, testified about the hostility that he saw between Brian and Rashaun over Jada. Did Brian and Rashaun get in any other disputes? Yes.

Were they over Jada? Yes.

Did you see any of those disputes? Yes, I did. Can you tell us what you saw? It was in front of the cafeteria. It It was just words between the two of them, and they moved on. It was nothing physical.

And former teammate Eric Moncourt testified about the day that they came up to his dorm room.

Brian ended up pushing him, and he pushed him, and I think he punched him, pushed him and punched him. And then he got on top of him and started headbutting him. And then I ended up grabbing Brian, pulling him off. And Rashaun got up and he walked out the room. He was like, Boy, you might as well go ahead and clip up. During course examination, the defense attempted to downplay the statement clip up.

You didn't actually believe that Mr. Jones was going to shoot anybody, correct?

No.

You didn't take this as a serious threat?

No. After this fight that happened in your dorm room in the summer of 2004, you thought that it was over at that point, correct? There was no further beef. Yes. And you never heard anybody bring this fight up again, right? Not to my knowledge. But the key testimony came from that alleged eyewitness, Paul Connor.

I'll keep this very brief. I really just have one question for you. What did Rashaun's teeth look like in November of 2006?

So if you think about it, this entire case could possibly come down to the description of someone's smile.

He witnessed taking the stand today in the murder trial of Rashaun Jones, a former UN professor, detailing what he heard and saw the night Brian Pata was shot and killed. The state plays for the jury a recorded testimony of Paul Connor from a hearing in 2022. Do you swear it were from that testimony? It was treated as regular testimony.

He smile at me.

He had a clean set of white teeth, no gold teeth. And that's about it.

I described him to the forensic artist.

And is this a fair and accurate representation of the sketch that was created based upon your representation? Yes.

The million dollar question in this is, did the jury believe Paul Connor? But another witness, Bruce Johnson, who was a teammate of both Rashaun and Brian, is called to testify.

The defense takes this as an opportunity to question him about Rashaun's teeth.

I really just have one question right off. What did Rashaun's teeth look like in your number of 2006?

They just went... Everything weren't straight. It was jagged, messed up.

Would you describe them as a clean set of boy teeth? No. Now, these two statements are completely at odds with each other.

Can you please introduce yourself to the jury and tell them where you're employed? Yes. My name is Juan Segovia.

I'm a Homicide Investigator with the Miami Dade Sheriff's Office.

One of the final witnesses that the state called was Detective Juan Segovia, and he had been assigned in 2020 to take over the case, and his testimony was incredibly useful for the prosecution because it took all these little pieces of testimony from all these other people and essentially tied it together in a very effective narrative as the motive, the means, the opportunity for Rashaun Jones to kill Brian Pata. What information did you gather that led to getting an report?

It was the threats accompanied with the display or talk of the same type of firearms that killed a victim. It was the phone records. It was the identification of Mr. Connor and all the circumstantial stuff that happened the night of.

The jury also got to hear the post-arrest interrogation interview of Rashaun Jones.

Let's talk about Jada a little bit. Jada's name comes up a lot during the investigation. Is that the first time that you have any beef with Brian whatsoever? Yeah. That you remember that was over in Jada? Yeah. You dated Jada? Never dated Jada. Did you guys have any relations? We had a relation once.

On cross-examination, the defense pressed Segovia on whether or not Rashaun ever owned a gun.

You have no personal knowledge whatsoever that Mr. Jones actually owned a firearms at any point, do you? Not legally. Not legally? Right. You have never seen Mr. Jones with a firearms? I've never seen The prosecution ends its case on the very graphic testimony of the medical examiner. I do. Who uses a model to describe the fatal injury that takes Brian's life. The pathway of the blood to Mr..

O'pau's body was from his left side, several inches above his left ear.

That was hard for the family. It was an incredibly emotional way to end those five days of testimony.

At this time, We had so many other leads, all of which were more viable than Rashaun.

Ultimately, the court ruled that these different viable theories be excluded. At this time, it affects rest. Even without that, we felt so good about the case because they still didn't have anything, and we trusted that a jury would feel similarly. I had to ask somebody next to me, did I what I thought I heard?

Mr. Jones, your attorneys have indicated after speaking to you that you do not wish to testify.

They're not going to call any witnesses on your behalf.

Have you had an opportunity to discuss that with them?

Yes.

Why did you decide not to testify in this case?

It's me.

We were stunned. I think anybody there who was witnessing this was wondering what had happened. Both the state and defendant have now rested their case. The attorneys will now present their final argument.

You'd remember one of the worst days of your life. You test positive, your future's unsure, you don't have a girl, you're going to get kicked off the team.

Things are not going your way, and then it all just boils over.

Does this look anything like Rashaun Jones? Does this look anything like Rashaun Jones? Nothing. Paul Connor's selection is not reliable.

It is not credible.

Rashaun Jones was not at the Colony Apartments. Rashaun Jones did not shoot him. Rashaun Jones had nothing to do with his death. Rashaun Jones failed a drug test. He was at home at the time that Brian Pata was killed. All rise to the group.

This family has been put through so much for so long, and they get so close to what they believe is finally going to be justice for them. I can't even imagine what they're going through.

We are now on verdict watch as the jury evaluates the evidence in the murder of his teammate, Brian Paddock.

The only thing that is not a foregone conclusion here is what that jury is going to decide.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, I've received your note. I I've received your note indicating that you continue to be deadlocked, and so at this time, I will declare a mistrial and a home jury.

Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to thank you for your time and consideration of this case.

The breakdown was five for not guilty and one for guilty. And the person who was leaning to guilty was just unmoved.

This has to be extremely difficult for the family, and in particular, Jeanette, Brian's mother. She has called for justice for her son, her youngest child.

Anybody who's seen the video of Jeanette running down the street, wearing Brian's jersey, yelling, Give me my baby.

Give me my baby. Give me my baby.

And then to I can't suppose that with her being wheeled into an elevator because she's so frail that she can't walk on her own, kept saying, 20 years, 20 years. We coming here.

We coming here. We only want to have and she still has that same desperate plea in her voice. Just we're frustrated, but we're also resilient. We're going to remain steadfast and confident that we're going to get the answers that we need.

What do you think he would do, Jim, for the money? That's a hard question to answer. I'll leave that for the next part.

There are no winners here. At the end of the day, we're still at the same place. We don't know who killed Brian. We don't know the truth, and I don't think we'll ever know the truth.

The damage is done. The lives of multiple individuals have been completely ruined.

His fate was really demoralizing and discouraging, not just for the Miami Hurricanes football program that fell into a precipitous decline after that. It was devastating for this city, and particularly for the community that Brian came from, which is always looking towards our athletes as role models, as symbols of hope and opportunity.

He did have such a love for the community that he was raised in, and he understood the importance of him making it. When you have a young person who's from this area and is able to advance not only the identity of Little Haiti, but become somewhat of an ambassador of the culture, and his life is taken way before his time.

It's heartbreaking.

Brian's part of his life and the tragedy of his experience is like a candle from the dark. And when that light is lost, it hurts us all. What's going on? Hello? I don't know. I'll look at a picture or something. I get emotional, but then I'll think back how we used to spend our time together and the jokes he would crack and the times we would spend and just those memories, the positive, all the good stuff. But you think of, Oh, man, he's not here anymore. That's when the tears flow. A gentle giant. Loving individual. Full of life, full of energy, positive energy. Someone who's truly missed. It's still hard for us today. A little bit after his death, I dreamt about Brian. He was talking to people. He saying he's okay, I'm okay. I wasn't supposed to die, but I got to go over on the other side. You guys won't see me anymore. God is letting me in the door now. That was his words. Then a big purple door opened and it's a bright light, and he walks in between. He looks and he waves. So I love everybody. I love everybody.

Then he hugs me. It felt so real. In, and the door shuts behind him. And then that was You know, it's a dream that keeps Brian connected to his loved ones. His family's journey for justice will continue as the state is expected to retry Rashaun Jones.

So more to come, David.

For additional information on this story, you can listen to the 3430 podcast, murder at the U, which chronicles ESPN's eight-year investigation into the case. That's our program for tonight. Thanks so much for watching.

I'm Deborah Roberts.

And I'm David Muir from all of us here 2020 at ABC News. Good night. I'm R. J. Decker, a private investigator, uncovering the Sunshine State's Darkest Secrets. Tuesdays, it's the premiere of ABC's hottest New Crime Show. R. J. Freaking Decker as I live and breathe. He's a private eye. It's not a standard murder. Someone bigger. And a public mess. Trying to get them back to prison today.

You go to prison one time, and suddenly it's all the jokes.

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