When the Miami-Dade police department sent ESPN an email in 2017 with a request for a nice, short piece on trying to generate leads for the unsolved killing of former Miami football player Bryan Pata, we could have produced a three-minute feature segment for a weekend football broadcast on the 2006 murder and a grieving family.
But we didn’t. Far from it. And to this day, the Miami-Dade police probably regret ever sending that email.
Because instead, over the next nine years, we would reveal the true story, a story of a police department’s many mistakes, cover-ups, and scandal that led to a questionable court case set to play out twice before a jury. We would file a public records lawsuit against the Miami-Dade Police Department. That would elicit testimony that proved they lied to us about suspects in the case. We would reveal that the key suspect had been a teammate. We would find that an alleged confessor, whom police ruled out believing he was in custody at the time, was actually NOT in custody the day of the murder. When prosecutors told a judge they believed their star witness was likely dead, we showed up at his apartment to find him very much alive. When police or prosecutors said they didn’t have a document or couldn’t produce a record, we called them out and reported on its location. We demanded transparency. In addition to the lawsuit, when prosecutors asked for prior testimony to be sealed from public view, we had our attorney submit an objection – and we won. We’ve held the police department accountable for an arrest they made 15 years after the fact with, by their own account, no new evidence. Our reporting included extensive context of the case and ran parallel to the Florida bar association’s determination of vast misconduct by the former lead prosecutor, and the lead detective’s anonymous Instagram account that denigrated the defense case mid-trial.
Over seven episodes – with at least one more slated to run after the second trial – we told the story of Bryan Pata, a 22-year-old University of Miami football player destined for the NFL who was shot dead in the parking lot of his apartment complex in 2006. Our series showed who Bryan was at that time – good and bad – and what he meant, as the youngest of nine children, to his mother Jeanette and to his sisters, brothers, teammates, coaches, and friends. We walked listeners through that fateful night, Nov. 7, 2006, when Bryan was killed, and the immediate aftermath. Then we told the story of the investigation, its many unresolved theories, our role in forcing the department’s hand, and the arrest and trial of Pata’s teammate Rashaun Jones in 2025. More than anything, we exposed the failures and deception of one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies on one of the nation’s most high-profile murder cases, and in the immediacy of a trial that would determine the future of another young man.
