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In 2006, a University of Miami football star

was executed in broad daylight.

Just steps from campus and just months away

from realizing his NFL dreams.

Brian Pada was only 22 years old,

the youngest of nine children,

a team leader in the world.

He was the only one in the world.

He was the only one in the world.

He was the only one in the world.

He was the only one in the world.

The youngest of nine children,

a team leader inside one of the most powerful programs

in all of college football.

His murder stunned the sport,

but then inexplicably went cold.

No murder weapon, missing witnesses, conflicting statements,

leads that fizzled out.

For nearly a decade,

Brian Pada's killing sat unresolved,

a long dormant case,

defined more by rumor than evidence.

Friends say that Brian was scared, paranoid,

convinced that someone was after him.

Whatever he feared,

he never lived long enough to explain it.

Years later, an ESPN investigation

would take a hard look at the case,

uncovering long buried details,

and raising questions that many had stopped asking.

What it surfaced would help re-ignite public scrutiny,

and thrust a long dormant cold case back into the spotlight.

Now, nearly two decades later,

a former teammate stands trial.

This is a story about loyalty and betrayal,

about truth buried in plain sight,

and about a family that never stopped waiting for justice.

From 30 for 30 podcasts,

you're about to hear the first episode of Murder at the U.

For the full series and continuing coverage

as the trial unfolds,

follow and listen to 30 for 30,

wherever you get your podcasts.

It's 2006.

Two guys in their 20s are driving down US1 in Miami,

in a black infinity SUV.

The AC's blasting, the music is blasting.

Who the fuck you think you're fucking with?

I'm the fucking boss.

745 white on white, that's fucking roast.

We on our way to my crib.

Did you have me to that rick roast?

You know, US1 going south.

So, you know.

The driver is a football player at the University of Miami,

Brian Palla.

The guy next to him in the passenger seat

is a sports writer from the Miami Herald.

His name is Manny Navarro.

Manny has his camera trained on Brian.

I was a young reporter who wanted to do something cool.

MTV Cribs was sort of big back then.

MTV Cribs was a show where celebrities led camera crews

through tours of their houses.

Manny wanted to make something similar for the Miami Herald.

But in Manny's version,

the celebrities would be University of Miami football players.

The hurricane.

So, my idea was just make these guys personable.

Tell a story that is unique in Miami.

These are Miami guys playing for Miami football program.

Brian was really the first guy I threw the idea across.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm down.

I'm down. Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm down.

I'm down. Let's do it.

And, you know, I got the camera on them

because I want to make sure I get the audio and the video,

you know, the whole thing.

The two guys head to Brian's apartment complex.

It's called the colony,

where 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 this 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?

I said, well, why don't you open the doors?

This is what they do on MTV crib, right?

They open the door. They walk me in.

What up, y'all?

It's my crib and Brian and Patta.

In the University of Miami, he gives a tackle.

If you walk in,

it says, you know, it's a townhouse.

It's a two bedroom, two-in-a-half bathroom.

You know, he's kind of like giving me the tour,

opening cabinets up and showing me stuff.

It's my cabinet right here.

I love pudding.

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 he started thinking,

yeah, it's only the Miami Herald right now,

but I could do this for MTV.

Like, this is like a nice little practice run, you know?

Here's some of 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 a girlfriend.

I got a dog.

Out of the net.

This is me, Brian, Patta.

Are you getting there?

Thanks a lot.

Full courthouse there is real 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 Patta would be dead.

We do have a breaking story.

A University of Miami football player has been shot and killed.

Amarusson's live in Kindle with the very latest hammer.

Michael Jackie, Miami day police confirming tonight.

Brian Patta, U.N.'s defensive lineman was shot and killed tonight.

We are told his body was found.

From the outside looking in, it was the kind of case 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 Patta.

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.

As a reporter, I tried 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.

Glad to have you with us.

How great is it to have college football back on a full Saturday?

College Game Day Rowan.

In August 2017, Ben received an email from an odd source.

I got an email that said the 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 a 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 in ties and police officers wearing tan uniforms stood in rows.

In front of them, at a table, set a family.

Brian Pada's family.

Brian's mom, Jeanette Pada, were colorful striped blouse.

In her hands, she gripped a magazine with Brian,

the 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?

It's not easy for me.

Because ten years and a half, we never find him.

We don't hear nothing.

We waited so long to find the answer who killed my son.

Nobody knew how I was feeling.

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, you know, I cry and cry and cry 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 and answer for my son.

And then, then the tone and ten are shifted pretty quickly.

I don't take even the work and the case anymore.

Look at the case, it's closed.

Nothing.

The room went silent.

Jeanette Pada 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 a motor to the 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 were first-hand knowledge.

This is the whoever's responsible for this.

We believe that either somebody close to him

or friend of family members,

somebody has to know who was 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, correct, but still it's still in an open status

and we're still working.

So, what's going on right now

if I'm here and to advance it?

Is there anything or is it kind of in a law?

Like, as far as any fresh new leads that came in though,

no, nothing, you know, we're kind of out of stand still.

So, this is hypothetical.

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 first-hand knowledge

of whoever the perpetrator is,

or as a 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,

it 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.

That would 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 defensive lineman for Miami,

gunned down yesterday at the age of 22.

So, take me back to that at the beginning.

Like, how did you start off with this

and you get this call?

Like, what do you do next?

I literally just began to pile up interview

after interviewing and just try to gain a stronger

kind of understanding of who Brian was

and how big for a lack of a better word his life was

and how complicated and layered it was.

Brian was the youngest of nine siblings.

In this spring of 2018,

I interviewed several family members

including Brian's mother, Jeanette,

and his twin older brothers, Edrick and Edwin.

They were the closest in age to Brian,

only two years older.

We walked the school together, we played football together,

we would do 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 they were as open and as honest as anyone

could have hoped for.

So for the weeks and months after the shooting,

police really tight-lipped.

Tight-lipped, not telling you much.

Not telling much.

Until it's goddamn day.

Tight-lipped.

At what point do you and the family start getting frustrated

with the lack of progress?

Three years later I enrolled,

giving us false hope.

What do you mean by false hope?

Pumping us up.

We got it.

We're going to do everything.

We can't.

We're going to do it.

We know who didn't.

I think that's just a freaking method

that they used to kind of console the family.

You know, kind of get them home.

Still have hope.

They used that for many years

until they got silent.

So we started calling the officers.

We're answering.

So many different damn detectives were assigned to the case.

It was just, no, who was this sergeant?

No, god damn, who was this dead?

No, who was this?

Oh, we don't know, such as the signs of that case.

I'm like, wow.

What the hell is going on? Confusion.

What do you remember about meeting Brian Patis' mom?

We met for the first time in 2018.

Jeanette was in her 60s at the time

and spoke with a thick Haitian 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.

Any time he came into the house,

see me later on in the bed.

Mommy, move.

Move, mommy.

Can I get a place to sleep, please?

I said, go get a sleep in the car.

No, mommy.

I want to sleep with you.

Eventually our conversation shifts it over to the investigation.

Miami police.

And there are 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.

Now I'm waiting for answer.

This is over too long of me.

Why did it take so long to find out 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.

Sometimes we call them not answer.

Then 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.

If so many people died around us, we were lucky.

I expected one of us to get killed.

And I remember saying to myself,

when I got the cause of my goodness,

thank God that nobody got killed.

I said all the time, like, man, nine of us.

And nobody got killed.

Especially with our older brothers, man.

And you would never think of 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.

Edric 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 neighborhoods

and turned them into NFL stars.

A program known simply as the U.

Take a look at Coral Gables.

It's a place of doing, of recreation

and cultural activity in many forms.

It's learning at the University of Miami

where young people of every age study everything else.

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 Son Tan U.

Billy Corbin is a lifelong Miamiian.

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 in debt 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 a 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 the podium forward

in such a manner that we can rank with a very best in the country.

Howard came in with no resources, 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 Schnellenberger's strategy, it worked.

When Miami's played a great football game,

they certainly deserve to be national champions.

By the end of the 1983 season,

Miami's football team won its 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 a 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 hurricanes 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 image is iconic.

Media coverage at the time tilted strongly against the hurricanes.

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 for Miami's black neighborhoods.

Once they were hurricanes,

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 who was arrested for allegedly hitting his girlfriend.

Any idea why?

I mean, 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,

run-ins with the police, trips to strip clubs on official visits,

money, sex drugs, you name it.

The NCAA banned the canes from playing in a bowl game for one season

and hit the team with other sanctions.

The NCAA put the school on three years probation

for handing out unauthorized financial aid to football players.

Their probation undermined the team's 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.

Dorsey, play fake once at all.

Going to the end zone. Touchdown!

Red and stride on Wade Johnson.

Great call.

These are years in which the Miami Hurricanes

should have won three national championships in a row.

By 2001, Miami fielded what many consider 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 Begayhee, 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.

We watched the championship game.

When they lost, he started to cry.

It is fourth down, the final play,

unless they can stick it in the end zone.

Dorsey, under pressure, throws it.

In complete, the boxers win.

That game cemented Brian's decision to become a hurricane.

I'm going to that school.

That school I want to play for.

I'm going to Miami.

That's all right.

Make your 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 to cook food for me.

Anywhere I go, you have to cook for me because I love the food.

So that's why.

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 defensive end,

and the guys on the defensive line were among his closest friends.

Ladies and gentlemen,

seven ninety-three,

Elaine Hill,

called a catfish.

Dwayne Hendrix, aka Catfish,

went on to play for the New York Giants.

But back in college, Dwayne was on the defensive line with Brian.

Eventually, they became roommates.

How did you spend your free time?

At the games I remember this day,

we would go to

small little bars to get wings.

Between me and him,

we're trying to pound back 50 to 100 wings

on average in all season.

You know, we trained.

And then we went out a little bit to some clubs and things like that.

Nothing too extreme.

As their friendship grew,

Brian started inviting Dwayne to his family's house for dinner.

I remember him bringing me to his mom's house.

Haitian people cooked the same thing that Jamaica's cooked,

because we had rice and peas.

I remember that energy that tasted the same way,

so it brought me back to my high school days

and with his family being Haitian

and my family being Jamaican.

I think we have some of the same values work hard.

You know, keep your head down.

And you get things that you want out of life

is because of the patterns that I didn't get home soon

because that was my home.

It was my second home.

And when I say,

I didn't call my mom as much as I should have

because I already had people.

I looked at his mom as my mom.

I looked at his brothers as my brothers.

Everybody used to think that we were related

and we were brothers or something like that.

That's Eric Boncourt.

Eric and Brian were actually rivals back when they played

for different high schools in Miami.

I thought that I was the number one defensive end in Daye County

and then all of a sudden,

this dude's ranked the head of me.

And you know, I was mad about.

I was pissed.

I used to say his name wrong on purpose.

Who was this paid-a kid?

Like, who was paid-a? Brian paid-a.

But they became friends

when they started playing together on hurricanes.

Brian gave Eric his nickname.

He was like, eat it.

This is your Haitian name.

This is your Haitian name.

It's like, all right, man.

Whatever.

Ever since then, everybody even called me 80.

In his junior year, Brian got a camcorder.

I'm a very similar to me at night.

The dorms over there.

And this is the front entrance of this dude.

And started making videos of his time in college.

Yeah, that's right.

Check your boy out.

Ooh.

You know, man.

Feel me.

Check my voices out.

He carried that camcorder around everywhere.

These tapes capture Brian as a football player,

hanging out with his teammates before early morning workouts.

What's up?

That wake up.

We got a long day to date up.

What?

Fucking, we got practice in the morning.

Class.

Study hard.

Practice in the afternoon.

Study hard, man.

They capture Brian's love of cars.

You know this is boy.

He's better.

You know, so I'm just showing y'all on my car or the whatnot.

They capture him joking around on campus.

No boy, shit.

No one's throwing his face.

Come here, boy.

And cat calling women on the streets of Miami.

I'm not away, man.

Come on.

Come on, man.

Shake something for the camera.

He ain't going to shake now.

He ain't got nothing to shake anyway.

They're a perfect time capsule of Brian's life.

And that mid-2000s pre-smart phone era.

He had that smile, though, like that laugh.

Chris Zellner played tight end.

And was also one of Brian's friends.

And now telling 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.

I was a jokester.

If he knew it was something little thing that annoyed you,

but you couldn't be mad on, he would do it.

So for me, it was the gold chain.

And it was kind of whatever the times were.

They clamped all the freaking time and I couldn't stand it.

And I was like, put it in your shirt.

It's so tired.

But then again, that's how I knew he was coming down the hallway.

Brian would go, Ms. Walker, Ms. Walker.

And then he would just keep saying it.

Like, do you want anything?

And he would just laugh.

Because he knew that I got on my nerves.

Brian's mischievous sense of humor stood out on the team.

That and his love for his mom.

He'd 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 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 his mom.

On the outside, Brian seemed carefree.

You could make anyone laugh.

His family and teammates loved him.

He was about to celebrate his first anniversary

with his girlfriend, Jada 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.

There was something mild on him.

And he was trying to say it.

But he didn't know how to express it.

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.

It's like, man, if you just want to open up this,

tell us what the heck is going on.

It's like, is somebody threatening you?

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 think his girlfriend said that at the time

that he should wake up.

See Brian's even 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 have felt safe sleeping in his closet.

It was because of what he kept in there.

He would go in the closet and just be hiding.

And you know, he was going to go grab his gun.

You know, he's concealed weapons that he had.

When Brian gave that tour to Mani Navarro,

the Miami-Herald reporter, weeks before his death,

there was something in the apartment

he didn't want on video.

I got to hide my guns, man.

You got licensed, man.

Yeah, I got licensed.

I got a gun, man.

They're straight dead, you know what?

Oh, don't, don't add them.

The gun thing on the paper or whatnot, please.

You know, it's not gonna be the favorite.

The thing is, Brian Pada wasn't the only one

on the team with a gun.

Reserved safety, Willie Cooper was shot and slightly wounded

outside his off-campus apartment

by a gunman hiding in the bushes.

We carried him from protection

because you just never know when you need it.

That's next time on Murder at the U.

And later this season,

an hour 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 this whole thing.

He had $14,000 cash in the car

and I see something in 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 MDPD know who killed Brian Pada?

Murder at the U is based on reporting by me,

Paula Levine, and Dana Ruta,

with support from Scott Frankel,

Elizabeth Merrill, and ESPN's investigative unit.

Our senior producer is Matt Frasaka.

Our senior editorial producer is Prithi Varathan.

Our associate producers are Megan Coil and Gustav Varro,

story editing by Adiza Egan,

additional editing by Ben Weber and Mike Drago.

Our archival producer is Matthew Fisher.

Our line producer is Kath Sankie.

Production managers are Jason Schwartz and Shina Williams,

fact checking by David Sabino.

Original music and sound designed by Ryan Ross Smith.

Chris Buckle is vice president of ESPN

investigative enterprise and digital journalism.

Marcia Cook, Brian Lockhart, Heather Anderson,

and Burke Magnus are executive producers for 30 for 30.