Murder at the U

March 7, 2026·1 hr 26 min·8 clips

A 19-year-old's abandoned car is found on a bridge, but is she missing or a victim of something more sinister?

Brian Pata was almost gone. He was a Miami Hurricanes defensive star, close to the NFL, when he was shot outside his apartment building on Southwest 77th Avenue. His family got the news by phone, and the first thing in the excerpt is not a theory. It is the blunt shock of a mother and loved ones trying to understand why he was dead. Then the story gets darker. A teammate had warned Brian that someone had a hit out on them. His girlfriend later found him sleeping in the closet near his shotgun. That detail does not solve anything, but it says plenty about the fear around him. One early lead, the Club Life investigation, seemed to fade without an answer. Police later heard from Bernard Brinson, a jailhouse informant who named Emanuel Jones. Brinson said Jones had talked about being paid for a hit and thought the target was Brian Pata. He passed a lie detector test. Police records had treated Jones as ruled out because he was supposedly already in jail on November 7, 2006. That timeline fell apart. The reporting found the robbery happened in August 2006, while Jones was not arrested until December, one month after Brian's murder. Miami police did not respond. Years later, a reporter reached Jones by phone and asked him to account for November 2006 after the alleged confession. Jones denied knowing anything. The program ends by sending listeners to ESPN's eight-year investigation, Murder at the U, as the state was expected to retry Rashawn Jones.

As heard by us

A careful, grief-heavy investigation where every new lead seems to widen the hole.

Murder at the U returns to the 2006 killing of Miami Hurricanes defensive star Brian Pata and treats it as a case built on absences: a shooting in the parking lot of his apartment building, a family left in shock, and an investigation that kept circling back to new names.

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Why you'd press play

You want a tense missing-person story where the facts keep shifting.

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