football

Football Player Arrested for Murder

The 2006 murder of Hurricanes football star Bryan Pata, one of South Florida’s most infamous unsolved killings, was finally closed. A spotlight thrown on the mystery by ESPN was the spark to build a fire under investigators and prompt them to take a harder look. Cell records, a key eyewitness, and a history of bad blood led to the arrest of a former University of Miami player.

Football teammate arrested

On Thursday, August 19, Miami-Dade homicide detectives arrested former University of Miami Hurricanes football team defensive back Rashaun Jones, without incident in Marion County.

The 35-year-old suspect was charged with first-degree murder and the paperwork is being filled out to have him extradited back to Miami-Dade County for trial. Jones has been living with the execution on his conscience for year-after-year but still swears up and down he didn’t do it.

When ESPN stuck a microphone in the former football player’s face he snarled, “I know I ain’t had nothing to do with it. So why would it bother me? What happened 12 years ago, happened 12 years ago. It’s got nothing to do with me. I didn’t do it.” The evidence says otherwise. The police had long considered him a suspect but for some reason never had enough to charge him with until after the ESPN story had people asking questions about why not.

“The Pata family has waited a long time to see the individual they had believed involved in Brian’s death arrested and charged,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle apologized. “While the time needed to build sufficient evidence to ethically charge in a homicide can sometimes feel endless, families should know that the passion and determination of police and prosecutors to resolve unsolved cases does not diminish.”

The detectives didn’t realize the cold-case murder of a star football player could still generate so much heat. They took another crack at it and solved it this time. “For nearly 15 years, our homicide investigators have relentlessly searched for the murderer of Bryan Pata.”

“They take great pride in their work ethics as they always represent their victims,” Miami-Dade Police Director Alfredo Ramirez insists. They would have charged Rashaun Jones sooner or later anyway, they claim, even without the feature story on the execution style killing.

Cool as a cucumber

Jones has acted cool as a cucumber all these years. He was psychopathically calm as he knelt “alongside fellow players when a giant portrait of Pata was unfurled at the Orange Bowl” after a football game.

He told police he was home alone on the night of the shooting. That’s his official story and he’s still sticking to it. If he was home, police want to know why his cell phone was near the scene of the crime.

Bryan Pata was a 22-year-old senior and budding football star with a future so bright he needed to wear sunglasses. On the evening of November 7, 2006, he was “shot in the back of the head and killed.” The execution happened “outside his home at the Colony Apartments.” Jones had recently threatened to “shoot him in the head.”

Pata’s ex-girlfriend, Jada Brody, was in the apartment at the time. Jones had also “been involved with Pata’s girlfriend.” The two had been “feuding” for months. Pata “who was considerably larger than Jones, had bested him in a fight.”

Pata’s brother told the police that “Jones had threatened to shoot him in the head” over it. He wanted Bryan to tell the coach but the football star kept quiet. Despite the claims Jones made to police that he never left his house, “cell records showed that at the time of the shooting his cellphone was away from the home and the signal bounced off a tower not far from the Colony apartments.”

Then, there’s the witness. Paul Conner “identified Jones as the man who was seen walking away from the scene.” The 77-year-old witness testified that he “heard the “pop” of the shot” then saw “a man wearing a black T-shirt and dark-colored shorts” who he “saw emerge from the apartment complex parking lot from the direction of the sound.”

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