The trial of former UM football player Rashaun Jones continued on Tuesday, Feb. 24, at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building.
Jones pleaded not guilty for the murder of his teammate Bryan Pata, who was shot and killed outside his apartment on Nov. 7, 2006.
Rashaun Jones was arrested on Aug. 19, 2021, nearly fifteen years after Pata was killed. In custody, Jones was interviewed by lead detective Juan Segovia, who was appointed to his position in 2020 after assisting with the case in 2006.
The jury not only heard Segovia’s testimony yesterday afternoon, but the recorded interrogation from the day of Jones’s arrest was played in court.
Throughout the interrogation, Jones insisted on his innocence.
“I have nothing to do with this guy. Nothing,” Jones said during the trial.
When asked about a motive to kill Pata during his interrogation, Jones recalls how Pata’s life outside of football was an expensive one, leading to him potentially getting involved in dangerous situations.
While Pata’s expensive life outside UM could be a motive, Segovia explains in a trial clip from NBC that he believes the reason was more intimate.
“That type of attack, a single gunshot wound to the head, to me, said it was a personal attack,” Segovia said while on the stand. “Everything screamed to me ‘personal.’”
To those who knew Pata and Jones, nothing screamed personal like the long-standing feud between the two football players.
In the recorded questioning, Jones admits his relationship with Pata was “up-and-down,” because of “jealousy over females,” alluding to the turbulence caused by Pata’s then-girlfriend Jada Brody, who is also Jones’ ex.
Jones recounted another altercation that occurred in 2004, where he and Pata engaged in a fight in a dorm room. After this incident, Jones purported that the fight marked the end of the tension between him and Pata.
However, during his testimony, Segovia claimed this catalogue of disputes was incomplete. According to Segovia, he interviewed those close to both Pata and Jones, who told him there was a lot of “bad blood” that continued well after the fight that occurred between them in the dorm room up until the time of the murder.
According to Segovia, there were “many” contradictions between Rashaun’s statements and witness testimonies.
During Jones’ recorded interview in 2021, Segovia asked about his whereabouts the night of the murder. Jones denied being near Pata’s residence, challenging the eyewitness testimony of UM professor Paul Connor. In a statement, Connor said “I saw a gentleman approaching the gate, maybe 15 or 20 seconds after I heard the bang.”
While Connor confesses he was only 90 percent sure the man was Jones, he picked Jones out of a lineup of similar looking men.
During his interrogation, Rashaun Jones claimed that reports of him calling Mike Sanders for money were lies. However, pulled phone records show that Rashaun called Sanders at around 10:00 p.m. on November 7th.
In Segovia’s testimony, he says the phone records also reveal that Jones’ phone was off at some point the night of Pata’s death. This corroborates Jones’ claim of turning his phone off, reasoning that he wanted to be left alone after testing positive for marijuana. However, the timing of the phone being off aligns with the time of Pata’s murder.
According to the Local 10 website, all of these details led to Jones’ arrest.
“All the historical previous threats he [Jones] had made to the victim [Pata], accompanied with the display or talk of the same type of firearm that killed the victim…” Segovia detailed. “It was the phone records, it was the identification of Mr. Connor… It was the lies about where he was that night.”
Tuesday evening, Rashaun Jones’ attorneys began their cross-examination of Segovia, questioning both the quality of the investigation and why it took so long to make an arrest. Also on Tuesday evening, according to NBC, Jones’ attorneys motioned for a mistrial. Their reasoning was that the lead detective, Segovia, referred to Jones as a liar. This motion was denied by the judge, and the trial will continue this week.