Mourners at Bryan Pata’s funeral, AP Photo/J. Pat Carter
Reporters for ESPN located a key witness in a murder case after prosecutors had deemed the man deceased. The revelation comes just weeks before the alleged killer is set to go on trial.
In November 2006, Bryan Pata, a defensive lineman for the University of Miami football team, was shot to death near his apartment complex. It was not until 2021 that his former teammate, Rashaun Jones, was arrested and charged with homicide. Jones maintains he did not kill Pata.
“Florida prosecutors have repeatedly told a court that a key witness in their murder case against a former Miami Hurricanes football player accused in the 2006 killing of teammate Bryan Pata was dead,” ESPN reporters Paula Lavigne and Dan Arruda reported in a piece published on Thursday. The reporters noted that “as recently as July,” prosecutors in Florida’s 11th circuit told the judge in the case that the witness, Paul Conner, was dead.
The reporters said they found Conner after knocking on a door in Kentucky:
However, with the long-delayed murder trial of Rashaun Jones only weeks from its scheduled start in Miami, ESPN reporters knocked on an apartment door in Louisville, Kentucky, recently and found the witness, Paul Conner, alive.
Conner told ESPN that he wasn’t aware anyone from Miami was looking for him and said he rarely leaves his apartment.
When Lavigne and Arruda informed the state attorney’s office that they had found Conner, a spokesperson said prosecutors had relied on a police database that said Conner was dead:
A spokesperson for the state attorney’s office, Ed Griffith, told ESPN on Thursday that police relied on a public database that “seemed to indicate” Conner was deceased and that police asked officers in Louisville to knock on Conner’s door. He offered no documents of such a visit nor details of when an officer visited or what happened.
Griffith also pressed a reporter for the address ESPN visited — the same address that was listed on the database report Griffith cited. The lead detective in the case, Juan Segovia, also texted an ESPN reporter asking for Conner’s contact information.
Jones’s attorney said she was “not shocked, but appalled.”
“This is a bigger issue,” the attorney, Sara Alvarez, said. “This is just blatant lies. Bald-faced lies.”
Conner previously lived in the same apartment complex as Pata, and contacted police shortly after the shooting:
Conner contacted police soon after the shooting, saying he heard a “pop” and saw someone “jogging” away from the parking lot entrance near where Pata was shot. Conner picked Jones out of a photo lineup.
Some 13 years later, Conner was reinterviewed in 2020 and again picked Jones out of a lineup, according to Jones’ arrest warrant. And Conner recounted what he saw at a 2022 bond hearing and in a 2023 deposition with attorneys.
Conner, now 81, told ESPN in his Aug. 25 interview that he now doesn’t recall what happened in Miami, and he seemed unfamiliar with his prior statements.
The reporters added, “The Miami-Dade Police Department’s inability to find Conner is the latest in a long string of official missteps that have dramatically prolonged the case and frustrated Pata’s still-grieving family.”
The lead detective in the case told ESPN that he left 15 voicemail messages for Conner since May.
Lavigne and Arruda said Conner showed ESPN his phone, which displayed dozens of unanswered calls and unchecked voicemails from Miami-area numbers.
“Miami-Dade officials and the judge did not have a death certificate, mortuary record, obituary or any other official record of death, but instead relied on a commercial third-party information provider,” the reporters stated. “Such companies often provide factual background information, but their terms of use disclose that information might contain errors, and they do not guarantee accuracy.”
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