MIAMI — Prosecutors rested their case against former Miami Hurricanes football player Rashaun Jones on Wednesday after presenting 21 witnesses in an attempt to prove that Jones had both a gun and a motive to kill teammate Bryan Pata and was notably missing from a mandatory team meeting on the night of the murder.
Attorneys for Jones offered an answer to all the circumstantial evidence jurors heard through five days of testimony but could not rebut the video recorded testimony of an eyewitness who twice identified Jones as the person leaving the scene of the shooting.
The defense was not expected to present additional witnesses, and jurors are set to begin deliberating Thursday.
Recorded testimony that former University of Miami writing instructor Paul Conner gave in 2022 was perhaps the most bracing testimony of the trial so far. The day after the shooting, Conner told police that around the time of the slaying, he saw a man leaving the apartment parking lot where Pata died, and he later picked Jones out of a police lineup.
The nine jurors sat at rapt attention Monday while watching the video, especially when assistant state attorney Kristen Rodriguez showed the jury two printed images. One was a forensic artist’s sketch based on Conner’s description days after the shooting. The other: a six-image photo lineup, including a picture of Jones that Conner picked out in 2007 and again in 2020, when investigators visited him in Ohio as they reviewed the case.
Conner was the witness who prosecutors and police, in their pleadings to use the 2022 recording in trial, told a judge was likely dead last year. ESPN reporters subsequently found Conner alive and living in Louisville, Kentucky, yet with significant memory issues that the judge determined made him unable to testify in person.
Jones, 40, has remained in custody for the past 4½ years amid court delays and changes in attorneys on both sides. He has maintained his innocence throughout, declining a pretrial plea deal of 15 years in prison with credit for time served. He faces up to life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder.
Jurors also heard from Jones on Tuesday via a recording of his interview with Miami-Dade Detective Juan Segovia on the day of Jones’ arrest in August 2021. Segovia testified that there was a “lot of bad blood” between the two players and that Jones had lied about his whereabouts and actions the night of the killing.
Teammates have stated, with varying degrees of specificity, that there was tension between Jones and Pata over Pata’s girlfriend, Jada Brody, who had previously been in a sexual relationship with Jones. The state did not call Brody to testify.
In the recorded interview, Jones told Segovia he could understand how his history with Pata could look suspicious but he had “nothing to do with him dying.”
He said there were some verbal spats between them over Brody, and he admitted to getting into a physical altercation with Pata in a dorm room more than a year before his death, but he said at the time Pata died, the two had “no beef.”
A former University of Miami athletic department compliance officer also testified that on the day of the killing, he had notified Jones that he was suspended from the team due to a failed drug test.
One of the state’s last witnesses Wednesday was a police cell-phone specialist who told jurors about the pattern and frequency of Jones’ calls, and he noted that cell tower records did not support Jones’ claim that he was “home all night” on the evening of Pata’s death until he drove to his then girlfriend’s home after getting news of the incident. The witness also spoke to a 58-minute gap in Jones’ phone usage right around the time of the murder.
But 2006-era cell phone technology is less precise than today’s phones, the specialist said, so while they could show Jones’ moving around the area, it could not “explicitly” place him at the crime scene. In response to questioning by a defense attorney, the specialist also noted a 56-minute gap in calls at an earlier time in the day as well.
In earlier testimony, some players and a coach testified to the different trajectories of the two athletes: Jones wasn’t as productive as a player, got in trouble, and one player said he was “reprimanded multiple times for various violations,” while Pata was described as a star athlete with an NFL future.
In their questioning of witnesses, Jones’ attorneys tried to establish that Jones’ alleged actions weren’t really out of the ordinary, noting that several football players owned guns, players routinely had relationships with the same women, and physical altercations weren’t abnormal in a locker room “full of testosterone.”
One teammate testified that he was with Jones in a mutual friend’s room and saw Jones with a gun that appeared to be a .38-caliber revolver, and another said Jones told him he had a “.38 on me.” Jones told Segovia in his interview multiple times that he did not own or carry a gun.
A firearms expert testified earlier that the bullet recovered from Pata’s skull was most likely from a .38-caliber revolver. The murder weapon was never found.
Prosecutors spent extensive time questioning multiple teammates, officers, and even Jones’ ex-girlfriend to establish Jones did not go the mandatory team meeting coaches called after hearing Pata had been shot, only for jurors to hear Jones himself in his post-arrest interview admit to skipping the meeting, saying he didn’t go because he was despondent after having been suspended for two games for the failed drug test.
One issue Jones did not address — because he said it didn’t happen — was questions about a call he made the night of the murder to University of Miami baseball player Mike Sanders asking for money. Jones’ phone records show he made the call, and Sanders testified to Jones having made the request.
Sanders told jurors that the timing of the call stood out because he knew the football players were at the mandatory meeting, and he drove to the university’s athletic center to tell coaches about the call.
Prosecutors closed their questioning with testimony from now-retired Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Emma Lew, who used a mannequin to show jurors how the bullet pierced Pata’s skull. Members of Pata’s family consoled each other and reached for tissues; one left the courtroom in tears during her demonstration.
For much of the trial, Pata’s loved ones have filled at least two rows of the courtroom gallery, with his mother Jeanette Pata in a wheelchair alongside her children.
Pata’s teammate and family friend Dwayne Hendricks spoke about coming upon Pata’s body and waiting for first responders — and then calling Pata’s mother.
“I tell people to this day that was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life,” Hendricks said.
Last week, after prosecutors played the 911 calls from the night of the murder, Jeanette — visibly upset and shaking her head — looked toward Jones and cried, “Rashaun.” Her children worked to calm and remove her from the courtroom, drawing attention from some of the jurors.
Florida 11th Circuit Court Judge Cristina Miranda in multiple pre-trial rulings denied requests from defense attorneys to introduce evidence of other leads police had pursued in the case, including an alleged hit put on Pata and his friends after a fight at a nightclub, threats from relatives of Brody, and two reported confessions by other men.
Defense attorneys tried multiple times over several witnesses to introduce some of the other leads police had pursued, evidence that had been entered into the record but for which there was no follow-up, and errors made in the investigation. Prosecutors objected each time to allowing the jurors to hear that information and Miranda usually ruled in the state’s favor.
Defense attorneys were able to establish in their questioning of Segovia that investigators did not have records for one of Pata’s phones, that there were no records generated in the case between 2009 and 2020, and that when police got a tip that an inmate had allegedly confessed to killing Pata for money, they ruled him out, mistakenly believing he was in custody when he was not.
Segovia stood firm on his belief in Jones as the murderer and in the quality of his investigation, saying the evidence always pointed to Jones.
In addressing the 15-year delay in making an arrest, Segovia said his deep dive five years ago into existing evidence, and his decision to repeat some interviews, gave him all he needed in 2021 to arrest Jones, who first emerged as a suspect shortly after the killing.
“It was all the historical previous threats he had made to the victim. It was the threats accompanied with the display or talk of the same type of firearm that killed the victim,” Segovia told the jurors. “It was the phone records, it was the identification of Mr. Connor and all the lies … the lies about where he was that night. The lies about the phone.”
Segovia said when he took the case over in 2020, he had taken the boxes of evidence and “stripped them down, literally page by page” to build the case. But when defense attorneys began to ask Segovia about missing records and other possible suspects, including a sheet compiled by other detectives noting the status of leads they had pursued, he noted that he saw no need to review leads he said he believed prior officers had eliminated.
Conversations between attorneys and the judge held outside the presence of jurors addressed questions regarding other potential evidence.
The first day of testimony, Feb. 17, was delayed after attorneys received new information about a reported confession — a tip received in 2009 from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who said an informant had overheard an alleged Haitian hitman confessing to the murder and mentioning Pata by name a few weeks after the murder. The alleged hitman also claimed to the informant to have left specific items at Pata’s gravesite, which the ICE agent later confirmed were present.
ICE and Miami-Dade police declined for years to answer ESPN’s requests for detailed information about the tip, and an officer told ESPN that the alleged hitman had died in the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
New information and a deposition of the ICE agent revealed an indication that the man was possibly alive and in Georgia in 2011, and that the ICE agent had said he was given the “runaround” in 2009 when he tried to convey the information to police investigating Pata’s killing.
Miranda has not ruled to allow testimony regarding the ICE tip into the trial.
ESPN’s Dan Arruda and Scott Frankel contributed to this report.