Murder at The U: The Teammate

This is Deborah Roberts here with another episode of Murder at the U from our friends at ESPN and 30 for 30 podcasts. This is the last episode of Murder at the U we'll be sharing for now. So if you want to listen to the rest of the series and learn what happens to Rashawn Jones, follow 30 for 30 podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or your favorite podcast app. Now, here's the fourth episode of Murder at the U. Previously on Murder at the U. Everybody's a suspect when somebody dies. It was Brian and the girl, man. I used to ask him, where are you getting all this fucking money from? He'd be like, oh, I gotta call my guy. He never said the name. But I just remember him, like, if you want it, man, come see me then. From the very beginning of our reporting, we knew the Pata family had a particular suspect in mind for who killed Brian. Yeah, we know who did it. We know who's responsible for it. This came in our first conversation with Edric Pata in 2017. Brian, our brother, was not killed from somebody from outside. He was killed from University of Miami. So they don't want to put it out there, but it was a teammate. In our investigation, multiple suspects emerged from different scenarios. There was a nightclub fight with suspected gang members, Brian's alleged connection to the Zopan leader, Ollie Adam, and potentially his girlfriend's twin brother. But this theory, that a teammate killed Brian, it had our attention from the beginning. At first, Brian's brothers, Edric and Edwin, didn't want to implicate this teammate by name. But over time, they eventually did share a name with producer Dan Arruda. Did he mention having problems with anybody on the team? Yeah. His only guy was O'Shawn Jones. The Pata family was convinced that Brian was killed by his teammate, Rashawn Jones. Edrick told us his suspicion started after a conversation with a former Hurricanes player. Man, y'all need to look at the goddamn school. He said, isn't this some grimy? He said, he used these words, some grimy niggas out there. I know somebody in the goddamn school know who killed Brian. Them cats know. Them players know. So when he says this to you, you think, what? like can't be true to miami it's miami man it's brotherly love it's it's my sister you it's miami they wouldn't you know who would do that when was the first time you remember someone saying to you were you guys putting together that rashawn was the one that pulled the trigger started sitting down with the teammate and then we started putting the puzzles together who did brian had altercation with brian had a fight with this guy and when we heard different things people started talking a little bit about Rashaun. People kept saying his name kept coming up. This is from former teammates? Yeah, former teammates, UF students. So people just started to talk. But could a teammate really have killed Brian in cold blood? As we dug deeper, we concluded that only one of two things could be true. Either Rashaun Jones killed Brian Pata, or someone else killed Brian, and Rashaun fell victim to a very unfortunate set of circumstances. I'm Paula Levine. From 30 for 30 podcast, this is Murder at the U. Episode four, The Teammate. After the PAT has identified Rashawn Jones by name in 2018, our reporting team tried to learn everything we could about him. Rashawn was in his junior year when Brian Pata was murdered. The police questioned him, but he didn't hear from them after 2007. Rashawn was still on the team in the spring, but then, after failing another drug test, he left. He transferred to a college in North Carolina, and he ended up playing arena football in Texas. But after Texas, Rashawn moved back home to Florida. In 2018, he married his high school girlfriend, Ashenda. By that time, he had five children. And this is where our timelines converge. It had been nearly 12 years since Brian's murder. Rashawn and the people in his orbit were going about their lives, most likely not thinking about Brian Pata, until we began calling them up and asking questions. Rashawn grew up in a small town in northern Florida called Lake City. Rashawn's friend George Timmons describes the town this way. It's just a little small country town. There's really not much of anything there. But, you know, everybody comes together for their sports. George grew up playing football with Rashawn from the age of 8 or 9. We played for the Jaguars as a Pop Warner team. We was on teams together since we were little boys. We've been friends forever, it seemed like. Rashawn was raised by his mother and grandmother. George said he and Rashawn would hang out at his grandmother's house. We all used to go there, sit with her, talk to her. His grandmother was really, she was like Rashawn's world. In high school, Rashawn became a nationally ranked cornerback. As he went into his senior year in Lake City, universities such as Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida recruited him. But, like Brian, Rashawn chose the U. George also decided to play football at Miami. I think me and him kind of went in it together because we were like, you know, we boys, we've been playing, let's just go down here and do it together so we won't be like you alone. So we'll have each other as friends when we get down there at Miami. Rashawn Jones recovers in the end zone for the touchdown. Rashawn joined the Hurricanes in 2004, one year after Brian. He played in about half the games in his first two seasons. Linebacker John Beeson came to Miami the same year as Rashawn and remembered him as a strong player. A guy could have been as good as anybody to play DB or return kicks. He was just a very, very talented dude. But to fans and observers of the team, Rashawn didn't really stand out. Even Nevin Shapiro, the Miami mega booster and self-proclaimed superfan, had no memory of Rashawn. So at the time, where was Rashawn Jones on your radar? Nowhere. I never met him my whole life. He wasn't a frontline guy, and I think he was an outsider for most. I've never met him. If he was sitting here, I couldn't identify him. We asked all the former Hurricanes players we spoke to what Rashawn was like at that time. He was just kind of in and out of trouble, like little stuff on campus or with the team, getting in trouble or suspended for games or whatnot, and that probably led to his demise as a University of Miami football player. At the U, Rashawn was remembered as an amazing athlete who didn't meet his full potential. He got in fights and received several suspensions. But like Brian, he was also funny in a charming way, and he stood out as attractive even on a campus full of young, hot people. Rashawn was a good-looking kid, man. He had a lot of girls. You know, the teeth, the attitude, the hair, the dress. Now, bear in mind, we spoke to a lot of team members, mostly friends of Brian's. We tried talking to more of Rashawn's friends, but several of them turned down our interview requests. So our sample may have been a bit biased, but lots of players said versions of the same thing. Rashawn, like, kind of rubs some people the wrong way. He's one of those cunning guys. He has a cunning look on his face all the time. He was a sleazeball like that. That's all he really did when he was at UM, was, you know, trying to fuck girls. Like, he wasn't trying to play football. You know what I mean? Teammate Eric Houston told us that Rashawn's interest in women often seemed more important to Rashawn than football. These hookups were a point of friction with more than one of Rashawn's teammates. According to the police report and our interviews, Rashawn would go behind players' backs and hit on their girlfriends. Willie Williams and Dave Howell both told police that Rashawn did this with the women they were dating at the time. Rashawn also allegedly went behind Brian's back to talk with his girlfriend, Jada Brody. He tried to mess with Jada while they were together. That's why they didn't like each other. Dan, you spoke to many of Brian's teammates. What did they tell you about his run-ins with Rashawn? So a lot of time has passed since they were all teammates. Details are kind of hard to confirm, but it was clear that Brian and Rashawn had several run-ins. One reason could have been because Brian's girlfriend Jada had at one point before dating Brian been involved with Rashawn. And when you say run-ins, like, did they just shout at each other? Were there fights? Like, what actually happened? Again, these are hard to be exact about. The dates aren't always consistent. One was a locker room scuffle after Rashawn said something about Jada to Brian. We also heard about an argument they had in the cafeteria, also possibly about Jada, but that one wasn't physical. And then there's one significant fight which several people have told us about, including one of Brian's best friends, Eric Moncour. What did Eric tell you about that fight? So according to Eric, he and Brian were returning to Eric's dorm room after an off-season summer workout. They get to the dorm room and the door is locked. But I see like, you know how the TV's on, you can see like on the ground. What the hell going on? So Brian and Eric go to another student's dorm room for a little while and they eventually come back. But now they see Rashawn running down that hallway and Eric's door is just wide open. When they get to the room, there's porn playing on the TV. Eventually, Rashawn comes back, but now it's Eric and Brian and another teammate, Dave Howell, all three of them in the room. And Eric confronts Rashawn about being in his room. So I'm like, Rashawn, what the fuck are you doing in my room, bro? Like, don't do that no more, man. Like, you know what I'm saying? And, uh, Brian just Came out of nowhere Like he started getting the Rashawn face And then You know their argument escalated And then they started fighting So Brian get on top of this dude And Headbutts him Five times Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom And I dove in there, grabbed Brian, threw Brian out, threw Rashawn out the room. And then Rashawn was like, well, you might as well go ahead and clip up. I was like, are y'all really going to, like, shoot each other right now over some stupid stuff? To Eric, Rashawn saying clip up meant bring a gun next time. It was a threat. According to their teammate Chris Zellner, Brian and Rashawn didn't get along afterwards. They were kind of hanging out before that, you know what I'm saying? Like, he would come over and talk, like, because Patty was friends with everybody. But I do remember after hearing that fight, they never, they weren't, like, fucking cool after that. They fucking did not speak anymore. Prosecutors talk about whether a suspect has motive, means, and opportunity for committing a crime. From all the stories we'd heard, we knew that Brian and Rashawn were at odds, and that it likely had something to do with Jada. that could have been a motive. What about the means? Brian was killed at close range with a handgun Remember before the 2006 season started a shooting that involved two Hurricanes players led head coach Larry Coker to institute a no rule a rule the players routinely broke At least two of Rashawn's teammates say they saw him with a gun. Dave Howell told police that Rashawn threatened him with a gun, and his description of that gun could match the one used to kill Brian. Remember how police couldn't find a spent bullet casing at the crime scene? The gun Dave said Rashawn pointed at him was a revolver, meaning it wouldn't have left casings behind. And teammate Kareem Brown told police that Rashawn said he always carried a revolver, a .38 caliber handgun. According to a detective's report, the medical examiner said a .38 was possibly the caliber of the bullet that killed Brian. So that could have been the means. And what about opportunity? To establish that, we'd have to track Rashaun's movements as closely as possible on the day of the murder. On the morning of November 7, 2006, Rashaun found out that he was suspended from the team for failing a drug test. He had marijuana in his system. And so Rashaun wasn't at practice that day, which wouldn't have been unusual for a player who'd been suspended. None of the Miami players we spoke to knew where Rashawn was during that whole day and afternoon. Again, that might not have been so strange, if not for what happened that night. We get a phone call, hey, y'all need to come to the team meeting room. I didn't know what it was, but they were like, no, it's important, get here now, get here now. Remember, immediately after Brian's murder, head coach Larry Coker called the whole team back to the Hect Athletic Center for a mandatory team meeting. According to deposition testimony from a coach, a meeting like that would have included everyone on the team, even players who had been suspended. From what we were told, all the players showed up for that meeting except Rashawn. Everybody was looking for him. Where's Rashawn? And the players noticed, including Chris Zellner. It was like, dude, the man kind of just went missing. Like, where the fuck did he go? And then you kind of start looking back and like, yeah, man, I really haven't seen him. He's gone. Yeah, he's gone. Like, I haven't seen him. So then you really start saying to yourself, like, yo, could it really be? According to police, Rashawn initially told detectives that he had shown up for the team meeting. Although, later on, he said that he'd stayed at home. Either way, on the night of the murder, police say that Rashaun made a phone call to another student athlete, a baseball player. This call was overheard by an assistant chaplain on the football team named Che Scott. Producer Dan Aruta got in touch with Che to follow up on that lead. Hello, Danny? Hey, Che. How are you, man? I'm doing great. How are you? Good. Is this a good time to talk? What did you tell him about our story? I basically told him we were reporting on what had happened to Brian Pata. Scott didn't know we'd been hearing rumors about Rashawn, and I definitely hadn't mentioned to him before that we knew about the overheard phone call. As you were talking to him, did that phone call come up? Yeah, after quite a bit of coaxing and reassuring, he eventually told me that the student athlete who had received the call was a University of Miami baseball player named Mike Sanders. We got a phone call from another player who seemed a little bit shaky and nervous about something, but I'm sure there were a lot of people that were a little bit scared that day. And today, honestly, you'd have to go through a list of names of people for me to even tell you what the person's name was. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I can't even tell you the player's name who called Mike that day. That player was Rashawn Jones, is that right? Yeah. And you know what? I'm actually getting a little bit uncomfortable with this whole thing. So it was a job, but I'm not going to get involved in anything else with this, honestly. So what happened after that? Well, he wanted to end the conversation right then and there. But fortunately, I got him to agree to meet me later for an unrecorded conversation face to face. And when you sat down with Scott, what did he tell you? Che Scott told me that at the time he was roommates with another football player on the team. The night of Brian's murder, Mike Sanders comes by the apartment to check on the football player because news of Brian's death has been announced everywhere. So Mike comes by just to make sure that the player is okay. While Mike is in the apartment, Mike gets a call from Rashawn Jones. Che overhears this conversation and it sounds like Rashawn is asking Mike for money. I think Scott believed that Rashawn was trying to gather money up so he can get out of town. A lot of guys that night were worried for their own safety. Brian had been killed. No one knew who it was. Some of them thought maybe people are targeting University of Miami players. Now, on the flip side of that, while a lot of players were worried about their safety, Rashawn is the only one that doesn't return to the Hex Center that night. Chase Scott was a chaplain, and so was Steve Caldwell. He was the other chaplain you talked to. Did Caldwell know about this phone call too? He didn't know about that specific call, but he had his own thoughts about Rashawn. What has stuck with me and has always been with me, that Rashawn has something to do with it. He was the only one that didn't show up to the team meeting that night. Why didn't you show up? Everyone got the call. Everyone knew. At first, we wondered if maybe Rashaun didn't get the call. That's because, according to the police, Rashaun changed his cell number after Brian's death. So it's possible that coaches couldn't get a hold of him because they didn't have his new number. But Rashaun's phone records seem to tell a different story. They show that Rashaun got a new phone number around 3 p.m., hours before Brian was killed. and at least one person on the football team had this new number. The log shows several calls with his teammate Bruce Johnson that night and Rashawn would later admit to police that Bruce had told him about the meeting. His phone records also confirmed that he called Mike Sanders' number around 10 p.m. And five minutes after that call ended, Rashawn placed two calls to an 800 number for Bank of America. That could be relevant because in the days before smartphones, one of the ways you could check your balance was to call the bank's automated number. Pastor Caldwell told us that he got a strange call that night too, but not from Rashawn. It came from Rashawn's girlfriend at the time, Sherry Abramson. Sherry's brother Ross also played on the team, and Sherry was one of Caldwell's Bible study students. Sherry called me in like in a panic about Brian being dead, and someone shot him, And she immediately asked me, is Rashawn there? She wanted to know if Rashawn was at the heck center that night. Right. And I said, no, he's not here. And I think he was the only player that didn't show up. And and she was just freaking out about him. And that's what I told police. She was just acting real weird about where he was and, you know, worried about him. When Sherry called you that night, do you believe that Sherry's worried for Rashawn's safety? At the time, I thought she was worried about Rashawn's safety. Like somebody was trying to get at University of Miami players. I didn't pay attention to it at that moment, but after dialing it back, and then once the investigators started talking to me, it was like, well, damn. Did she know something? Did she know that he was planning something like this? Or why was she so worried about his well-being? And I asked myself that question. Objectively speaking, I think she was worried about something because she knew something. What I truly believe is that I think Sherry could shed more light. I think she could. So you knew that we wanted to talk to Sherry. How long did it take for you to get in touch with her? Sherry was my white whale for a while. Our team always believed that if we were ever going to learn what happened to Rashaun and his actions that night, Sherry was going to be the key. It took more than a year of texts and calls to get her to go on the record with us. Hello? Hi, Sherry. It's Dan. How are you? Hey, good. How are you? Good. Is now a good time? Just give me a second. And when you finally did get her, what did she tell you about that night? On the night of Brian's murder, Sherry was actually working at Pottery Barn. I don't have good service there. So once I got out, my phone was going nuts. And it was one of the other players that got me on the phone, and the first thing he said was, where's Rashaun? And I said, I don't know, I just got out of work, what's up? He said, I need to find him. I'm like, okay, why? And I said, somebody shot Pata. I said, what's that have to do with Rashawn? He said, well, he left practice because he got in trouble. And he's the only one that we can't account for. And I said, I got to go. And I called him a million times. And I did not get a hold of him. What was your concern for Rashawn in that moment? Was he safe? Was he okay? And that was because a teammate had just been shot, and he was the only one that they couldn't track down. Yeah, I mean, had he been shot too? I didn't know. Why wasn't he there that day? Do you remember that? Yeah, he tested positive again for marijuana. You said you tried him a bunch of times. Did it just, what happened when you called? It would just go to voicemail? Yeah, his phone was off. I called his grandmother. I called maybe his sister. I called everybody asking, had you heard from him? Is he okay? Have you heard from him? Nobody knew. So he finally called me a couple hours later. When you finally got a hold of him, how did that conversation go? I said, where the hell are you? What happened? He told me what happened, that he showed up for practice. He had another positive test. They told him that he's gone. So he said he left. He shut his phone off. He was very upset. And taking the time by himself to kind of process, you know, he knew he fucked up. So he spent that afternoon on his own. is what he told you? Yeah, that he was just driving around or that he went to go think or, you know, it was something along the line. Was that something he did normally, just kind of go off by himself when things weren't going well or was that abnormal for him on that day to do something like that? No, he loved going for drives alone. He would just go. He would go anywhere. He would go up 95 just for a drive. He would go down Ocean Drive. he would just go always. He liked to smoke like a cigarette kind of a thing and just drive, put his stupid music on really loud. So it's not surprising to me. It wasn out of character So we spoken to someone who says Rashaun called another student that night and was looking for money to get out of town Does that ring a bell? Does that sound... No. It doesn't? No. It doesn't seem accurate at all. Because what I do believe, and maybe I'm a fool or something like that, if he needed money or somebody to help him get out of town, it would have been me. Did you tell him that evening what had happened to Brian? I didn't have to. He already knew. Do you know how he found out? Yeah, everyone was calling him. What was his reaction to finding out that Brian had been shot? He was shocked. He knew it was fucked up. He couldn't believe it. What was their relationship like, Brian and Rashawn? There wasn't a big relationship between the two. I mean, it's not like they had like an outstanding feud. I mean, they did get into it in the locker room one time. But I mean, that's all that it was. Did Rashaun at one point date Jada? I don't know. Date? No. Could they have been talking, texting, something along those lines? Sure. There wasn't a girl in Miami that he didn't talk to at one point. Rashaun. Yeah. Do you think that could have been the friction between them? That Rashaun at one point was hooking up with Jada? Nothing around with Jada? Sure. I wouldn't doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised. It wouldn't shock me. Did he tell you why he didn't end up going back to the Hex Center that night? No. I don't recall. When was the next time you saw him? I don't recall. Probably that night. Did he come to your place, do you think? Always, yeah. Was Rashawn worried for his safety that night? You know, I don't know. I think he was trying to stay under the radar. A lot of people were assuming that he had something to do with it, so I think he just wanted to stay kind of quiet. So you think even that first night people were pointing fingers at Rashaun? I think in the first minute people were pointing fingers at Rashaun. See, that's the thing that surprised us. Like, if you say that they didn't have a terrible relationship, I don't understand why people would point fingers at Rashaun right away. I don't know. I mean, I can tell you over the course of our relationship, he was never somebody that, like, flashed guns around. and he never, to my knowledge, ever had a gun on him. Did he have a gun? Possibly. Had I ever seen it in a couple years we were together? No. Was his reaction to Brian's murder more sorrowful Brian or scared that this could be more than just Brian? I think it was a mixture of the both. He definitely seemed genuinely upset that Pato was dead. I mean, there were no tears shed in front of me. But, I mean, there was no celebration either. He didn't like Pata. There's no secret there. They did not like each other. Did it ever, was there ever anything that would have justified him murdering him? No. Nothing that I ever knew of. so a motive of he was so upset that he had been kicked off the team and he had to take his anger out on somebody and brian was the closest person that he could think of i'll never believe that why not i'll never ever believe that because pat had pat had nothing to do with him testing positive again nothing and if you're asking point blank do i think that he did it the answer is no I don't. Do I think he could ever pull the trigger on anybody just to take someone's life? I don't, no. There's some people that I would tell you, sure, yeah. It just isn't him. He was his grandma's boy. You know, like he wasn't raised by tough guys. He was raised by, you know, his grandmother and then his mom. So it's not like he was raised with, you know, like thugs and, you know, in a violent household. He wasn't. I mean, I might be one of the only ones that you talk to that can't do this, but I mean, I don't think that Rashawn had anything to do with this. I think that the timing was unbelievably coincidental in a terrible way. Just don't think he has it in him to be a killer. Really don't. Well, I think you hit it on the head, Sherry. I think the reason so many people are able to believe so easily is because that window that Brian was murdered. That was when he was missing. Yeah. On a horrible day for him. I see that. I understand that. So Sherry's version of events is that this is just a really terrible coincidence for Rashawn. That's right. She believes if Rashaun had been with her or with anyone else that could give him an alibi, none of this would have happened. Sherry Abramson could be right about Rashaun's innocence. But some of what she told us doesn't line up with information we have from Rashaun's phone records. They show that Sherry and Rashaun were in touch a number of times that night, starting before Brian's death at 7 p.m. And there's no evidence of a missed call from Sherry after news of the murder had started to spread. Instead, he called her twice around 7.45. Sherry apparently didn't pick up. Then Sherry called Rashaun back at 8.30. That call lasted 12 minutes. We asked Sherry about these discrepancies, but she didn't remember it playing out that way. Still, the fact of the matter is that Sherry said she didn't think Rashawn could have done it And she wasn't the only one I feel like the whole situation, it really got blown out of proportion This is Rashawn's childhood best friend and roommate George Timmons again He refers to Rashawn by his nickname, Rick I don't think Rick did it, I really don't I believe Paddle was, sometimes he had an issue He had spurts of being a bully sometimes. And I feel like he messed with the wrong person outside in the streets. And somebody, somebody. But like I said, I personally did not, I don't see Rashawn doing that. Rashawn would never, my personal opinion. And like, Pat had a lot of enemies. We talked to another friend of Rashawn's about that night, a fellow UM student named Trish Morgan. Trish was also very close with Brian. They'd known each other since they were 14 years old. She says they were actually distantly related. We never ran down our lineage, but we have a cousin in common, so we always said that we were related on my mom's side. Trish was so close to Brian and Jada that after the murder, Jada came to live with her for a while. Dan spoke to Trish in 2019, When he asked whether she'd heard the rumors about Rashawn's involvement in the murder, she said she couldn't imagine it. I would never in a million years, a million years, like Rashawn was one of my closest friends at Miami. I don't see Rashawn committing murder. Trish, what was he like? Describe Rashawn back then. I mean, I can describe him now. I saw him and his wife a couple months ago. they came to Atlanta. He's funny. He is hilarious. She was always a good friend to me. And I thought she was a good friend to Brian. I don't, maybe you know something that I don't know since you hear this rumor. After Brian's death, life went on for the Hurricanes. The team didn't skip any of its scheduled games. Head coach Larry Coker explained that decision in a press conference. Players expressed the opinion they wanted to do what they felt like Brian Patton would want to do. They felt like Brian would want to practice. They felt like Brian would want to play. And so that's a decision that we respected, and I think it's the right decision. Life went on for Rashawn, too. His drug suspension lasted two weeks. He returned to the roster by Miami's next home game, which was on Thanksgiving. That was the game where the team gathered around a banner of Brian to pay tribute to him. Thank you. 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. What a moment. Miami fights from behind. Initially, the photo of this moment looked to us like a team united, grieving one of their own. Players are kneeling in what looks like prayer. Some are holding hands. Almost all of them have their eyes closed. But now one player sticks out, Rashawn Jones. There are almost 100 players on this team, but somehow he's made it to the front row. He's on one knee, looking down at Brian's face on the banner, arm in arm with his teammates. Knowing the rumors that were swirling around the team at that time, that photo started to look very different to us. dan did other players on the team say that they thought rashaun might have been involved we ended up speaking with more than 20 players over those first few years reporting some said yes it wouldn't surprise them eric moncore actually said the rumor started the night of the murder so none of you guys after brian's death ever thought to yourselves or talked amongst each other and said i wonder if rashaun did it yeah you guys did yeah because we was like, we were the only one who wasn't here. Did all the players you talked to have that reaction? No, not at all. Some said they couldn't imagine one teammate killing another. It was just too hard for them to believe. I talked to Josh Holmes about a month after interviewing Eric Moncourt. Josh was one of the freshmen that Brian gave a lift to the dorms earlier that night. This is the first time I've ever heard that, to be honest with you. Yep. Yeah, it's the first time I've ever heard somebody say something on our team possibly to blame for it. I talked to Randy Phillips, who was a sophomore defensive back on that 06 team, and he reacted the same way. Rashawn. I don't even think Rashawn was down here at that time, was he? Yeah. I mean, I never heard that. You never heard that? That's the first time I ever heard that. What about the coaches? Had they heard these rumors about Rashawn? To my knowledge, no coach has ever admitted to hearing rumors about Rashawn. I asked Coach Hurt about it, and he says he was surprised to hear any kind of rumor like that. The family has a theory about what happened. They believe that Rashawn Jones had something to do with it. What is your reaction to that? Boy. One, surprise and shock because I was not under the impression that their relationship was that bad. that they had that strong with dislike from one another. You know, I heard stories about, you know, that those two had issues and they didn't get along, but I never heard it be like a relationship that was so bad that it could ever go to that. So I would just be shocked if I don't have an opinion on it. If I think that's the case or not, I have no idea. But when I spoke to Ed Hudak that Coral Gables police officer who worked security for the Canes he said he had discussed that very possibility with head coach Larry Coker His name came across my desk talking with Coach Coker and things like that and some things that he was dealing with because I'm not privy to all the stuff, what his performance issues were, but there was a very strong sentiment that he had something to do with it. When that was brought up to me by the players, I made sure that the detectives had that, and what came of those leads, I don't know. Do you remember how the coaching staff reacted to that possibility? I think some of them bought into it. Some of them said, nah, it wouldn't happen. Or you would get that, well, if it was any of our guys, that kind of thing. How do you interpret what Ed Hudak just said when he goes, if it was any of our guys? I took it as if anyone on the team could be suspected of something like this, it would be Rashaun. How did the team feel about having Rashaun around with all of these rumors swirling? Pastor Steve Caldwell told me it was weird. This was something that was a hard thing to discuss because I believe everyone thought, I'm not going to say everyone, that's absolute, but a lot of people thought we had a killer amongst us. that's what blows me away, is that he was allowed to return and be with the team with this cloud of suspicion over him. But what do you do as a coach when you have no substantiated proof? So you go to what they say, innocent until proven guilty. And so that's how you operate as a coaching staff. Early on in his reporting, Dan spoke with head coach Larry Coker. He wanted to ask Coker directly about the Rashawn theory. I'm working with the family on this, and I've interviewed his mom and his brothers and sisters, and they have a theory that there was someone involved in his shooting that was involved with the team. Would that surprise you if that was true? Yes. It would. Why would it surprise you? I just don't believe that. You don't believe it's possible that anyone that had some kind of affiliation with the team was capable of something like that? I don't believe it's possible, but I don't believe it. I don't believe it happened that way. What do you believe happened? I don't know. I don't know. He was tragically murdered. Whether Coker believed it happened or not, the rumors were out there. They were swirling among Brian's closest friends and family and had found their way to the police. Dave Howell had his own history with Rashawn and had witnessed the fight between Rashawn and Brian in the dorm room. He remembered the police asking him about whether that could have been a motive. I told him I said no. I didn't think that it would go that far. But like I told them, I said, which you never know because you don't really know the inside of an individual. But like I told him then, I said, I don't see him taking it there. But others did. And their suspicions were still running high when Dan interviewed them. I don't know if he can come to a UM function. Really? Kareem Brown was a defensive lineman in the same year as Brian. Dan spoke to him in 2018. Do you think Rashawn knows that people think he may have something to do? Of course. You do? Oh, he's not stupid. And I don't think he would come and just like, hey, I'm in Miami, guys. Like, I don't think he would do that. Because who knows what would happen from there. Here's what we've learned about Rashawn. He had a series of conflicts with Brian. He would have known the hurricane's practice schedule and what time Brian would arrive home. And teammates said he owned a gun. No one could vouch for where he was at the time that Brian was killed. and he'd called a friend reportedly asking for money to get out of town. When we finally reviewed Rashaun's phone records, we noticed the call logs were only from the number activated that afternoon and nothing from before. When we asked the state attorney's office about that omission, they declined to provide any information. On the call logs we did have, we saw that he'd made or received 56 calls after Brian died. Four of those calls were with Trish Morgan, who was friends with both Rashaun and Brian. Five were with his family back in Lake City. Eight were with his teammate, Bruce Johnson. And 16 were with Sherry. But there's one notable gap in Rashaun's call log. For one hour, between 6.40 and 7.40 p.m., there were no calls in or out. The one hour all night that Rashaun's phone wasn't active was the time of Brian's murder. According to the police report, there were no eyewitnesses to the shooting. No murder weapon was ever found. There wasn't any security camera footage, and there was no record of any physical evidence linking Rashaun to the crime. The entire case against Rashaun Jones appeared circumstantial. But then there's this, a piece of evidence we learned about only in our final interview with detectives. There was an individual who saw a black male running away from the scene, who's a resident in that apartment complex, and he's cooperating with the investigation. And he's still, at this point, we can't disclose his identity because he's still an active witness in this case. When we heard this, I felt like a cartoon character with an exclamation point going off over my head. It's still unclear what prompted police to finally disclose this information after five interviews and two years of conversations, but we were grateful for it. We'd eventually learn more about this witness and what he told the police. He didn't witness the shooting itself, but he saw someone leaving the colony apartments on foot. He would later identify Rashawn as the person he saw. Throughout our reporting, we'd hoped to get Rashawn's side of the story. Remember, it had been 12 years since Rashawn had talked to the police about Brian's case. We knew we might get only one chance to talk to Rashawn, so we wanted to wait until we had done enough reporting and knew exactly what questions to ask. In the spring of 2019, Dan finally got Rashawn on the phone. Rashaun didn't want the phone call to be recorded, so after they hung up, Dan filled in the rest of us on a conference call. Welcome to the Walt Disney Company Conference Center. Enter your conference code. Thank you. You will now be placed in conference. Hi, who's on? Dan's here. Danny, what do you got? It's not good, unfortunately. I spoke to Rashawn twice in the last half an hour, the first time we got cut off. He is pretty adamant that he will not be taking part in our story. Rashawn's feelings are this has been over for 12 years. The police didn't follow up after their initial interview. This is over and done with. This is a part of his life that he doesn't want to go back to. He sees absolutely no reason and nothing good that can come from sitting down and talking to us. He said himself, if God Almighty came down and asked me to sit down, I would not do it. Did he say why? He just doesn't see any reason to do it. He says he had nothing to do with it, and nothing he can say is going to change anyone's mind, and he doesn't care what anybody thinks of him anyway. Did he say anything about possibly being a suspect? All he said was that I talked to the police 12 years ago, that I talked to them, Sherry talked to them, and I never heard from them again. So obviously I'm not a suspect, or else I would have been arrested. I mean, I got to admit, innocent or not, like either way, I mean, he's not wrong. It's not a great strategy for him to talk to us. It makes sense that he wouldn't want to. Stop, stop, stop. Rashawn is calling me. I'll call you back in a minute. Okay. About 20 minutes later, Dan came back onto the conference call. Oh, wow. You guys all still there? Yep. What do we know? So it wasn't Rashawn. It was his wife. And we just had one doozy of a conversation. Obviously, Rashawn is a bit freaked out about all this at this point. and he called his wife and she decided to call me to try and figure out what's going on. So I explained to her as best I could what we were doing, why we were doing it. I tried to make it clear, as I did to Rashaan, that we're not out to get anybody, that we have no agenda, that we're trying to do our diligence as journalists in allowing him to give us his side of the story. And she, just like he, said there is no his side. He didn't do anything. The police spoke to him once. He was never arrested. There's no side of the story. She said, you know, it's got to be his decision, and whatever he decides, I will back him on. Rashawn decided not to sit down for an interview with us, nor would his wife. After all, it had been over a decade. He knew the police had looked closely at him years ago, but nothing came of it. Why would he talk to a group of reporters about this case when it had all happened so long ago? But once we began asking questions, the sense that all of this was firmly in the past began to unravel. And if Rashawn thought that the Miami-Dade police no longer considered him a suspect, that confidence would turn out to be very misguided. Does MDPD know who killed Brian Potter? Yeah, we have a strong belief that he was responsible for his death. That's next time on Murder at the U. Murder at the U is based on reporting by me, Paula Levine, and Dan Arruda, with support from Scott Frankel, Elizabeth Merrill, and ESPN's investigative unit. Our senior producer is Matt Frasica. Our senior editorial producer is Preeti Varathan. Our associate producers are Megan Coyle and Gus Devarro. Story editing by Adiza Egan. Additional editing by Ben Weber and Mike Drago. Our archival producer is Matthew Fisher. Our line producer is Kath Sankey. Production managers are Jason Schwartz and Sheena Williams. Fact-checking by David Sabino. Original music and sound design by Ryan Ross Smith. Chris Buckle is vice president of ESPN Investigative, Enterprise, and Digital Journalism. Marsha Cook, Brian Lockhart, Heather Anderson, and Burke Magnus are executive producers for 30 for 30.