BONUS EPISODE: Murder at The U

Your battle was in the season 16 of our show, Murder at the U.

“This season, we're doing something a little different.”

We're following a story that's been unfolding for 20 years, but it's coming to an end right now.

Because in Miami, one of the city's most anticipated murder trials is finally happening.

And it centers two college football players from one of the most legendary and notorious schools, the University of Miami. One of them is dead, one is on trial for killing him. This season, we tell the story of how a case that left a team divided

that seemed unsolvable for years, finally made its way to trial, and why a team of ESPN reporters refuse to let it go. Today, we're bringing you episodes one and two of the series, and we'll be back at Retused Ant Thursday with new episodes while this trial is happening in real time.

So stay tuned and thank you for listening. (upbeat music) It's 2006. Two guys in their 20s are driving down U.S. one in Miami, in a black and finicky SUV.

The AC's blasting, the music is blasting. ♪ Who the fuck do you think you're fucking with ♪ ♪ I'm the fucking boss ♪

♪ Some 45 white on white ♪

♪ That's fucking gross ♪

“♪ I'm the one ♪ ♪ We're on our way to my crib ♪”

♪ Can you have me take that red cross? ♪ ♪ We keep on coming ♪ ♪ We know you as one, one, so ♪ ♪ I'm like ass ♪ ♪ So you know ♪

♪ You're riding ♪ The driver is a football player at the University of Miami, Brian Palo. The guy next to him in the passenger seat is a sports writer from the Miami Herald. His name is Mani Navarro.

Mani has his camera trained on Brian. I was a young reporter who wanted to do something cool. MTV Crabbs was sort of a big back then. MTV Crabbs was a show where celebrities led camera crews through tours of their houses.

Mani wanted to make something similar for the Miami Herald. But in Mani's version, the celebrities would be University of Miami football players. The hurricane. ♪ Stay a muscle in every day, a muscle in every day ♪

♪ Go, go, go ♪ ♪ Go, go, go ♪ So my idea was just make these guys personal. Tell a story that is unique in Miami. These are Miami guys playing for Miami football program.

Brian was really the first guy I ate through the idea, cross.

♪ Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm down. I'm down. Let's do it. Let's do it. And you know, I got the camera on him, because I want to make sure I get the audio and the video. You know, the whole thing. The two guys had to Brian's apartment complex. It's called the colony.

We're several other University of Miami players live. It's classic Florida with corridors on the outside of the building. Like a motel. We get to his apartment. He's like runs in there. He starts picking stuff up, moving stuff around.

He's like, don't record yet. And he says, how do you want me to... Where do you want to start? So why don't you open the doors? This is what they do on MTV Crabbs, right?

They open the door. They welcome you in. I love y'all. My crib, I'm Brian Fatter. University of Miami. He was a tackle.

If you walk in, it says, you know, it's a townhouse. Two bedroom, two and a half back home. You know, he's kind of like giving me the tour, opening cabinets up and showing me stuff. My cabinet right here.

I love put it. He was just... he was so happy to kind of be the star of the show.

“You know, I think in his mind, I think you started to think,”

again, it's only the Miami Harold right now, but I could do this from TV. Like, this is like a nice little practice run. You know, here's my family during the Florida State Game. My two sisters, my cousin.

This is my mom right here. And this is my girlfriend, Jada. I just remember the feeling of this kid is so happy with his life. He knows that the best is yet to come. Like, this is good.

Life is good. I got to go, friend. I got to talk. Other than that, this is me, Ryan Potter. Are you getting it? All right. Thanks a lot.

Who could have stairs with quick? All right. But it was sort of this feeling of things are going to get better. It seems that way, listening to the recording,

hearing Brian's enthusiasm, his giddiness, except for one thing. A few weeks later, Brian Pada would be dead. We do have a breaking story. A university of Miami football player has been shot and killed.

Amro's son's live in Kendall with the very latest demo. Michael Jackie Miami Day police confirming tonight, Brian Pada, UN's defensive lineman, was shot and killed tonight.

that police should have been motivated to solve quickly. A star player on a major college football team murdered near campus, just a few months shy of the NFL draft. But that is not what happened. Instead, weeks turned into months which eventually turned into years

and Brian's murder remained unsolved.

But almost 20 years later, someone is finally set to stand trial

for the murder of Brian Pada. I'm Paula Levine. From 30 for 30 podcasts, this is murder at the U. The story of how two university of Miami teammates found themselves on opposite ends of a murder investigation.

And what happened when a team of ESPN reporters brought that investigation into the light. Episode 1. Chillin with the Canes. Do you have symptoms such as constant bracket obsession

“or moderate to severe bracket related distractions?”

You may be living with bracket brain. Thankfully, there's ESPN tournament challenge. The number one proven way to treat bracket brain right at the source. So this March, download the ESPN tournament challenge app, fill out your men's bracket and get you and your brain in the game.

ESPN tournament challenge play the number one bracket game presented by all state. It's the middle of the night in a small town on the Jersey Shore. Someone reports an abandoned car on a bridge. A search gets underway for the missing driver. 19-year-old Sarah Stern.

Is it a missing person? Is it a suicide? At this point, nobody knows. Old friendships. Baring cash.

And a sinister plot that was once pitched as a movie plays out in real life. I'm Juju Chang from 2020 and ABC Audio. Listen now to Bridge of Lives wherever you get your podcasts. As a reporter, I try to stay out of the story, but sometimes the work you do to get the story and what you uncover changes it.

That's exactly what happened here. And that story starts in 2017 in the office of Ben Weber. I was a feature producer at ESPN. One of the shows Ben worked on at the time was college game day. ESPN's weekly show about college football.

In August 2017, Ben received an email from an odd source. I got an email that said that Miami Police Department was interested in helping us tell this story in an effort to try to find new leads. The story was more than 10 years old. And it was about the unsolved murder of a University of Miami football player, Brian Pada.

“Is it unusual for police departments to pitch stories to ESPN?”

I'll say in my 25 years here, that's the first and only time that that has happened.

But Ben looked up the case. And as he was scrolling through the results, he found a video of a press conference about this murder. It had happened only three months earlier. It started pretty regular press conference. Ben would be the first of us to watch this press conference,

but we'd all come back to it over and over again. In many ways, it was the reason we all got pulled into this case. The press conference was at the Miami-Dade Police headquarters in a non-descript fluorescent lit room. Detectives and ties and police officers wearing tan uniforms stood in rows. In front of them, at a table, said a family.

Brian Pada's family. Brian's mom, Jeanette Pada, wore colorful striped blouse. In her hands, she gripped a magazine with Brian, her youngest son on the cover. The photo showed a young man with locks squinting in the Miami Sun. He wore a bright white Miami Hurricanes football uniform with a number 95 on the shoulder.

It's been ten and a half years.

“How much easier is it for you to cope in a half years later?”

Is this not easy for me? Because ten years on a half, we never find him.

We don't hear nothing. We waited so long to find the answer, who came my son.

Jeanette was answering a question and then I think she just was overcome with emotion and thought about

ten and a half years have gone by when we still don't have answers. My heart, I cry and cry and don't have, but sometimes before I go to bed or whatever, I have to pray. I say, God, I'm in your hand. One day, you're going to find me the answer for my son. And then the tone and ten are shifted pretty quickly. I don't take even to work in the case anymore, who could have the case is closed. Nothing.

The room went silent. Jeanette had just accused the Miami-Dade Police of ignoring her son's case.

She insinuated that the Miami PD had done nothing and it became a little bit more accusatory

and ramped up the uncomfortable nature of that press conference. I don't know what the police officers expected to get from that press conference, but I can almost guarantee that it wasn't this. Next, a reporter addressed the lead detective in the case, Miguel Dominguez.

“And within the ten years have there been any leads?”

Yes. Yes. We've followed the multitude of leads. Obviously, we don't have anything solid enough to make an arrest at this time. Dominguez stood directly behind the family. His head was shaved clean and he had a long horseshoe mustache. So what are you asking from the public? We believe that there's somebody out there who are firsthand knowledge. This and the whoever's responsible for this, we believe that either somebody closer or

friend of family members, somebody has to know who's involved in this and we're hoping that we get a phone call. Is it fair to say that after that press conference, after that plea that Dominguez didn't get the phone call with the new evidence or the new witness or new information that he was waiting for?

“Yeah, I think that's really fair and I think that's what led them to reach out to us at ESPN.”

Like Ben said, this was an unusual pitch for college game day, but he was intrigued. So he set up a call with the detectives on the case to find out more. So the case is still open on your end, right? Right. Right. So it's still in an open status and we're still working. So what's going on right now on your end to advanced? Is there anything or is it kind of in a wall? Uh, like there's words in each fresh new leads that came in though? No, nothing. You know what kind of

it stands though. So this is hypothetical. So you don't, you know, if you can't answer it, that's fine. But how ultimately do you guys think this case is going to get solved? By somebody coming forward and having a first-hand knowledge of whoever the perpetrator is or the guy, you know, told somebody what he did, we believe there's somebody out there that knows.

Here's what Ben knew. The case had gone unsolved for more than a decade. And at the same time,

Miami-Dade Police were convinced that someone somewhere knew something. So in September and October, we really started to dig in and do a lot more research on Brian on the murder and then went down towards the end of 2017. So I was making a quick trip down to Miami and started to do initial interviews and then realized this could turn into something big. So he began to build a team. We have a feature producer that lives in Miami. Let me see if he

has a willingness to help out or be involved in this project. My name's Dan Aruda. I'm a feature producer with ESPN and I've been living in South Florida since 2015. When you got the call about

“working on this project, what did you remember of Brian's story? I clearly remember it being a”

national sports story and it led sports center for several days. Brian Patta, Senior Defense of Lime and for Miami, gun down yesterday at the age of 22. So to take me back to that at the beginning, how did you start off with this and you get this call? What do you do next? I literally just began to pile up interview after interview and just try to gain a stronger kind of understanding of who Brian was and how big for lack of a better word his life was and how complicated and layered it was.

Brian was the youngest of nine siblings. In the spring of 2018, I interviewed several family members including Brian's mother, Janette and his twin older brothers, Edrick and Edwin.

played football together. We were doing everything together. Tell me about Edwin and Edrick.

“I think the first thing you notice about Edwin and Edrick is their size. These are two guys who”

played collegiate football and they carry a certain swagger and confidence with them.

I think the second thing you'll notice is just how kind they are. Here I am. I'm coming

into their lives asking about the worst memory of their life and there's every chance to be guarded and wary about sharing their thoughts with me. But there was opening as honest as anyone could have hoped for. So for the weeks and months after the shooting, police really hyped-lipped. Tight-lipped. Not telling you much? Not telling you. Until it's got damn day. Tight-lipped. At what point do you and the family start getting frustrated with the lack of progress?

“Three years later than Roe given us false hope. What do you mean by false hope?”

Popping us up. We've got it. We've got it. We've got it. We've got it. We've got it. We've got it. We've got to do it. I think that's a freaking method that they use to consult a family. You know, to get them homes. Still have hope. They used that for many years until they got silent. So we started calling the offices. We're an answering. So many different damn detectors were assigned to the case. It was just no, who was this sergeant? No, got damn. Who was this dead? No, who was this? Oh, we don't. No,

it's not just the time that it gates and like wow. What the hell is going on? Confusion.

What do you remember about meeting Brian Pattas' mom? We met for the first time in 2018.

Jeanette was in her 60s at the time and spoke with a vacation accent. She was incredibly warm and kind. What was Brian like when he was a little boy? When it was funny boy and like to laugh and make a joke. Yeah, make it people. You know, happy. Even you sad. He tried to make you happy. Anytime he come into the house, see me later than in a bed. Mummy, move. Move, mommy. Can I have a place to sleep please? I said go, okay, sleep in a couch. No, mommy. I want to sleep with you.

Eventually, our conversation shifts it over to the investigation. Miami Police and her feelings about them. What were her feelings about the police? Frustration. You could just tell she was angry and had lost all her patients with them. I'm now I'm waiting for answer. This is over too long of me. Why did it take so long to find out what who killed my son? 11 years. 11 years? Have you kept in touch with the police all these years? What have they told you?

Nothing. Sometime we called it not answer. They didn't do nothing in the case. Jeanette raised Brian and his siblings in Little Haiti, a community in northern Miami with one of the largest concentrations of Haitian Americans in the country. In the 80s and 90s, if there was a headline

“from Little Haiti, chances are it was a story about crime. The truth is, the family had always feared”

one of them would die young. They just never thought it would be Brian. He's so many people died

around us who were lucky. I expected one of us to get killed and I'm a rescuing to myself when I got to college. I'm my goodness. Thank God that nobody got killed. I said all the time like man, nine of us and nobody got killed. Especially with all the brothers man and you would never think it the last child. In college, his senior year, you get killed. You would never think it, especially because Brian had been on track to be a football star. For the patas, football was supposed

to be a way out of Little Haiti. So Edwin played at Florida International University and Florida State. Edrick played two seasons at a junior college in San Jose before transferring to Virginia, Union University. And Brian, of course, chose the University of Miami. Brian would join the University of Miami at a high point for that school's football program. A program that took kids like Brian from Miami's neighborhood and turned them into NFL stars. A program known simply as the you.

Take a look at Coral Gables. It's a place of doing of recreation and cultural activity in many forms.

When you drive from downtown Miami to Coral Gables, it's like you've traveled to a different

“more affluent world, luxury cars fill up parking lots. There are fountains in the middle of the”

roundabouts. And well-manacured lawns surround giant Mediterranean style houses. Coral Gables is its own city. A city built around a medium-sized private university. The University of Miami.

The second you drove around this town and you saw how beautiful the place was and you saw the

lifestyle that college students have when they're here. It's why I got the reputation as Sunday and you. Billy Corbin is a lifelong Miami. He's also the director of two 30-for-30 films about the University of Miami. He's a little obsessed with the place. My grandfather graduated from the University of Miami School of Law about 70 years ago before the current campus even existed. He has had season tickets to the Miami Hurricanes since he was a student there 70 years ago.

“I am also a graduate of the University of Miami. I'm profoundly in debt. Not indebted to but”

indebted as a result of my attendance at the University of Miami. Today the University of Miami

carries the legacy of being a hard-hitting trash-talking football program with the chip on its shoulder. Billy says that story began in 1979. When Miami hired Howard Schnellenberger to be their head coach. It's going to be our objective to move this program forward in such a manner that we can rank with a very best in the country. Howard came in with no resources, with with not a lot of money, with not an opportunity to send assistant coaches on the road buying plane tickets so

they could go scout players in other states. And then the creative solution was why don't we recruit Miami and plant our flag here? Well we recruit heavily in state and heavily in South Florida, the bulk of our talent comes from this area. And that became a real point of pride for a lot of people in Miami. And Snellenberger's strategy? It worked. Miami's played a great football game. They certainly deserved to be national champions. By the end of the 1983 season, Miami's football

team, when it's first national championship ever. Winning is obviously the best pitch you can make

to a kid in Liberty City or in Little Haiti, just to say like come and be a part of this winning tradition and create an opportunity for yourself, not only from high school to college, but from college to the NFL. As the team won, they became notorious for their antics on and off the field. Antics that earned them their national bad boy reputation. Take one incident from 1987 when the hurricane's played against Penn State in the festival. The team walked off their plane

wearing top-to-bottom military fatigues and sunglasses. The Miami squad made noise the moment it reached Phoenix. They looked like extras in a rambo movie, the images iconic. Media coverage at the time tilted strongly against the hurricane. Are these guys really thugs or did they just put on this kind of image for the festival? Because Miami recruited locally, their team was largely made up of players from Miami's black neighborhoods. Once they were hurricane, these players

became celebrities almost overnight. When sports reporters would moralize about the team, they'd use code words like inner city, but you could tell they meant black. Well, they had their reputation because they've had a lot of problems with police. They've had fights with fellow

“students. They've had one player was arrested for allegedly hitting his girlfriend. Any idea why?”

I mean, are they just some problems? They give the excuse that they live in a big city, but that doesn't condone anything. We had this college team on the rise and it was a college team made up predominantly of Miami kids and it was a major point of pride for everybody in this town, particularly when the team played with an us against the world mentality and Miami had this us against the world mentality. This us against the world mentality would only grow stronger after an NCAA corruption scandal hit

the football program in 1995. University of Miami players reportedly took cash prizes for big plays in violation of NCAA rules. The accusations became part of Miami's law. There were out of control football dorms, runins with the police, trips to strip clubs, unofficial visits,

and hit the team with other sanctions. NCAA put the school on three years probation for

“handing out unauthorized financial aid to football players. Their probation undermined the team”

standing in performance for a while, but the talent pool of recruits was still strong. By the end of the decade, the canes were back. Dorsing, play fake ones at all, going to the end zone, touchdown, red and stride, and way Johnson. Great call. These are years in which the Miami hurricanes should have won three national championships in a row. By 2001, Miami field did what many considered to be the best college football team of all time. Well, Miami has erased all doubts about

the national champion. They are clearly the national champions of college football in the year 2001.

Those early 2000s, Miami teams had guys like Ed Reed, Jeremy Shockey, Santana Moss, Willis Bighahi, Devon Hester, the list goes on. These were the teams Brian was watching as an elite recruit at Miami Central High School. In 2003, when Brian was a high school senior, he and his brother Edrick watched Miami play Ohio State in the festival. In the we watched the championship game when they lost, he started the crowd. It is fourth down, the final play,

unless they can stick it in the end zone. Borsing, under pressure, throws it in concrete, the above guys win. That game cemented Brian's decision to become a hurricane. I'm going to school. That's what I want to play for. I'm going to Miami. That's why I make a decision. Yeah, I'm going to Miami. Why was it important for him to go to Miami? He got to Miami because I'm here. That's why maybe he don't want to leave me because sometimes he said, "Mom, I want you. I want

“you cook food for me." Anyway, I go. You have to cook for me because I love the food. So, that's why”

I love the food. From the players and coaches, all the way down to the athletic trainers and equipment managers, there are a lot of people who make up a powerhouse college football team, easily 200. You can feel that when a game is about to start. Waves and waves of people pack onto the field. It's part of what makes college football so different from other sports.

The sheer numbers. And so, within this giant team, you have position groups within defense and offense. Brian played defense event and the guys on the defensive line were among his closest friends. Ladies and gentlemen, 993 playing here, caught a cap at fish. Duane Hendricks, aka Catfish, went on to play for the New York Giants. But back in college, Duane was on the defensive line with Brian. Eventually, they became roommates.

How did you spend your free time? At the game, I remember this when we would go to like small little bars to get wings. Between me and him, we're trying to pound back 15 to 100 wings. And all season, you know, we trained. And then we went out a little bit to some clubs, things like that, nothing too extreme. As their friendship grew, Brian started inviting Duane to his family's house for dinner. I remember him bringing me to his mom's house. Asian people

“cook the same thing as Jamaicans, because we had race and peace. I remember that energy”

tasted the same way. So it brought me back to my high school days with his family being Haitian and my family being Jamaican. I think we had some of the same values for card. No, keep that down. And you get things that you want out of life. It's because of the patterns that I didn't get

home, so because that was my home. It was my second home. And when I honestly, I didn't call my mom as

much as I should, because I already had people. I looked at his mom as my mom. I went to his brother, that's my brothers. Everybody used to think that we were related and we were brothers or something like that. That's Eric Bunkour. Eric and Brian were actually rivals back when they played for different

all of a sudden, his dudes ranked the head of me. And you know what I was mad about? I was

pissed. I used to say his name wrong on purpose. Who's this paid-up kid? Like, who was paid-up? Brian paid-up. But they became friends when they started playing together on hurricanes. Brian gave Eric his nickname. He was like, "Eady, this is your Haitian name." That's right. It's like, "All right, man, whatever." So they have ever, ever since then, everybody even called me "Eady." In his junior year, Brian got a camcorder. I'm a versatile man, he had names.

The dorms over there, and this is the front entrance of the school. And started making videos of his time in college. Yeah, I'll check it boy. I do. He carried that camcorder around everywhere. These tapes capture Brian as a football player.

“Hangout with this team mates before early morning workouts. What's up, that wake-up, right?”

Who got a long day to date up? What? Fucking we got practice in the morning. Clash, study hard, practice in the afternoon. They capture Brian's love of cars. You know, this boy, they can turn up. We've got him. You know, I'm trying to show you how my car is doing now. They capture him joking around on campus. They're bullshit, no, we're talking about this face. Come here, boy. And cat calling women on the streets of Miami.

And at mid-2000s, pre-smart phone era. Here that smiled on like that lab. Chris Zellner played tight-end, and was also one of Brian's friends. And I tell you that shit lit up the room. He made everybody laugh. Oh, he was just one of those guys that you wanted to be around.

“Smiling and goofy and kind of annoying. That's how a lot of people at the U remembered him.”

Like Carol Walker, his academic advisor. Brian was a jokester. If he knew it was something little thing that annoyed you, but you couldn't be mad at him, he would do it. So for me, it was the gold chain and it was kind of whatever the chance where they clanked all the freaking time. And I couldn't stand it. And I'm like, putting it in your shirt on so tired. But then again, that's how he knew he was coming down the hallway.

Brian would go, "Miss Walker, Miss Walker." And then he would just keep saying it. Like, "Do you want anything?" And he would just laugh, because he knew that got on my nerves. Brian's mischievous sense of humor stood out on the team. That and his love for his mom. He put his daily phone calls with her on speaker, so his teammates could hear. Here's his teammate Dave Howell. And you would hear her talking. And I was like, "Oh,

she sounds so sweet." She'd always ask them, "Did you eat? How are you doing? How was your

day?" And just the level of affection he showed to his mom. And he demonstrated it to everybody. He didn't just kind of hide in the corner like, "Oh, hey, Mom. Just calling you real quick." He showed and anybody who you speak to knew, you know, his mom. On the outside, Brian seemed carefree. He could make anyone laugh. His family and teammates loved him. He was about to celebrate his first anniversary with his girlfriend, Jayda Brody. He had every expectation of

going to the NFL. But there was also this. In the months before his death, something had been troubling Brian. So something mild of him. And he was trying to say it, you know, but he didn't know how to express it and tell us. He didn't want to burden you with it, but he kept it in. And then this is the thing that hurt us, man. He was like, "Man, if you just wouldn't open up, just tell us what the heck is going on." So there's somebody

threatened using it. I don't worry about it, man. But he did tell his brother that he was having nightmares. I keep getting away, man, but they keep chasing me. You know, like bad nightmares,

“I don't know that. I think his girlfriend said that at the time that she would wake up,”

see Brian, see him in the closet, you know, because he's fighting these things and his dreams and his

sleep. He never told his brother, who might be chasing him. But Edrick knew the reason Brian might

closet and just be hiding and, you know, he'd go try to go grab his gun, you know, and then he's

“"I'm still wet with that he had." When Brian gave that tour to Mani Navarro, the Miami Haralder Porter”

weeks before his death, there was something in the apartment he didn't want on video. "I got to hide my guns with, but you got license from him, right?" "Yeah, I got license. I got a license. I got a license. I got a license. I got a license. I got a license. Oh, don't, don't add them. Oh, the gun thing on the paper I want not. Please." "No, it's not going to be the paper."

“The thing is, Brian Paddo wasn't the only one on the team with a gun.”

"Reserve safety will a coper was shot and slightly wounded outside his off-campus apartment

by a gunman hiding in the bushes." The carating from protection because you just never know

when you need it. That's next time on Murder at the U. "And later this season, our before he died, he was on a phone arguing with somebody." "Well, come and get it then. You know where you can find me?"

“"Well, I'm actually getting a little bit uncomfortable with his father's shelter."”

"Yeah, 14,000 miles cash in the car and I see something you're right."

"This is an assassination and there's more to this than meets the eye." "A lot of people thought we had a killer amongst us." "I stopped looking into it because I was warned that these people will literally come up in your house and kill your family." "Does M.D.P.D. know who killed Brian Paddo?" Murder at the U is based on reporting by me, Paula Levine, and Dan Aruda, with support from Scott

Frankel, Elizabeth Merrill, and ESPN's investigative unit. Our senior producer is Matt Frasica. Our senior editorial producer is Prithi Varathon. Our associate producers are Megan Coil and Guestavaro, story editing by Adiza Egan, additional editing by Ben Weber and Mike Drago. Our archival producer is Matthew Fisher, our line producer is Kath Sanky. 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. [BLANK_AUDIO]