Jurors: Miami murder case lacked direct evidence

A lack of direct evidence and inconsistent testimony from the lead Miami-Dade police detective caused most of the jury to decide prosecutors hadn't proved ex-Miami Hurricanes player Rashaun Jones killed teammate Bryan Pata, according to jurors who spoke with ESPN.

The trial ended in a mistrial on Monday, with one juror telling ESPN that only one of six jury members wanted to convict Jones, and the other five wanted to acquit. In Florida, a six-person jury must be unanimous.

Prosecutors indicated in a hearing Tuesday morning with the judge and defense attorneys that they intend to retry the case. Florida law gives them 90 days in which to do that, and the parties are scheduled to meet Wednesday to pick a new trial date.

Prosecutors did not immediately comment, and neither did a spokesperson for the state attorney's office. Jones' attorney, Sara Alvarez, spoke to media after the hearing and said she will ask the judge to lower Jones' bond, currently set at $850,000. A GoFundMe page has been created to raise the money.

Three jurors answered questions for ESPN after the mistrial, and all wanted to remain anonymous. An alternate juror who was dismissed before deliberations also offered his perspective on the proceedings and agreed to be identified by his first name, Ryan. The lone holdout juror could not be reached.

Ryan said he feels bad for the Pata family, who "seem like lovely people," but said police simply didn't prove their case against Jones.

"They don't deserve that because I think they were misled [by police]," Ryan said. "I mean, somebody did it. But they didn't have what it took to prove that it was Rashaun. ... They presented us with a motive that was flaccid ... there wasn't enough there."

One of the anonymous jurors told ESPN: "We just think the state hadn't proved their case."

"A lot of speculation, a lot of things that pointed to him [Jones] ... In order for us to get there, we had to make a lot of assumptions," the juror said. "We didn't feel like we should be making those assumptions ...There were so many gaps in the evidence that we needed."

Jones, 40, was charged with second-degree murder in the Nov. 7, 2006, killing of Pata, who was shot once in the head in his apartment parking lot. However, Jones was not charged in the case until 2021, and the case, and nearly all the evidence against him, was circumstantial amid a flurry of police missteps that came to light over the years, in large part through ESPN's reporting.

Jones had maintained his innocence throughout and declined plea offers just before trial that would have limited his prison time instead of risking up to life in prison.

The juror who spoke to ESPN by phone said the six jurors were unanimous on one point: "We all did feel the Miami-Dade Police Department did a horrible job with this case." The jury also struggled with the testimony given by lead detective Juan Segovia, who took over the investigation in 2020. "We just did not believe him at all," the juror said.

Another juror wrote that Segovia "seemed too passionate and eager to convict" instead of just answering questions, and the juror also said it was confusing why the former detective on the case wasn't able to make an arrest for 15 years.

All three jurors agreed that there were problems with the testimony from the state's one eyewitness: Paul Conner, a former University of Miami writing instructor who said he saw someone leaving the apartment complex parking lot shortly after the shooting. Seven months later, he would pick Jones' photo out of a lineup when asked to identify the man.

"We don't believe he lied about what he heard or what he saw or that he thought he saw this person," one juror said. But when Conner said he looked at the roster of football players to see who might be in his classes and that he attended games and ate in the cafeteria, it made it possible that Conner had seen Jones on campus and recognized him from there, one juror said.

One of the jurors who spoke to ESPN added that testimony from the state's cellphone expert really swayed the jurors toward an acquittal because records showed how close the cell towers were in the area where Jones and Pata both lived, making it impossible to put Jones at the scene.

Jurors were "annoyed" by police testimony that they pulled phone records from multiple individuals but brought just a few into evidence, and that they were missing records from one of Pata's phones, the juror said. Another juror wrote in a text to ESPN that the state presented "old phone records with confusing data."

One pillar of the state's case was that Jones killed Pata in part because of jealousy over Pata's girlfriend Jada Brody, who had previously been in a sexual relationship with Jones. Teammates and friends varied in their testimony as to how much tension actually existed between the two, and jurors didn't understand why they didn't hear from Brody herself, one juror said.

Brody had been listed as a possible witness and was deposed by attorneys leading up to trial, but neither side called her to testify.

"For me, I needed to hear from Jada," the juror said. "I needed to understand how toxic was this relationship between these two."

Said alternate juror Ryan: "I just was shocked that, you know ... Jada, Jada, Jada, Jada .... and she wasn't there."

"And I thought, well, maybe she's also not available," he said.

On the other hand, jurors heard from multiple players brought to testify that Jones did not attend a mandatory team meeting at the athletic facility the night of the murder.

"We know he didn't attend the meeting. We didn't need 10 football players for that to be understood," the juror said, also noting that Jones himself said that he wasn't at the meeting in a post-arrest interview with Segovia that prosecutors played for jurors during the trial.

Bringing all those teammates in to testify also diluted the state's efforts to prove that Jones was known to have a gun, the juror said. The juror noted that only two of the teammates -- whom jurors took note later became police officers and were friends of the Pata family -- testified that Jones had a .38-caliber gun, the type a firearms expert said was most likely used in the shooting. No weapon was ever recovered.

"Surely you can find more players if this was 'common knowledge,'" the juror said.

Even though Pata was dating Brody and had two years earlier been in a physical fight with Jones, and even though Jones had been suspended from the Miami team for a failed drug test, "that doesn't mean he wants to kill someone," one juror wrote to ESPN.

The jurors noted that even though Pata was destined for the NFL and Jones was not, the two played different positions and were not in competition for playing time.

One of the jurors said the state's efforts to have Segovia tie it all together failed, and another agreed.

"We just felt like there were a lot of inconsistencies that came out of his testimony," the juror who texted with ESPN said. "What he did when he got the case, what he followed up on. He became very combative during his testimony. It's just a feeling that he just did not come off as very credible to us."

While the judge allowed defense attorneys to get limited testimony and evidence into trial regarding the other leads police had, one juror said they had reasons to question the work.

"There was a lot of follow up that they didn't do. Stuff they didn't look into," the juror said.

ESPN's Scott Frankel contributed to this report.