Go to the Sun-Sentinel website, below, to see some really touching photos as well as a photo gallery of Bryan, his family and U-M teammates, and how they've tried to honor him and keep his spirit alive in them.
Sun-Sentinel Hurricanes beat reporter Omar Kelly, never one to shy away from his feelings, shares some additional thoughts on Bryan Pata:
"Bryan was in my thoughts on draft day. While I watched Jon Beason's family celebrate Beason achieving that life altering dream of making it to the NFL I thought about the pain the Pata family was in. Not just on draft day, but every day."
Read the whole entry on Omar's consistently prescient and insightful blog at:
http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/sports_college_hurricanes/
The Sun-Sentinel's up-to-date 'Canes site is at:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/college/hurricanes/
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/sfl-sppata07may07,0,3820662.story
UM player's slaying 6 months ago remains unsolved
By Omar Kelly
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
May 7, 2007
NORTH MIAMI ·
Jeanette Pata's world is still turned upside down.
The Haitian immigrant who worked double shifts as a hotel maid to provide for her nine children can no longer work. She barely eats, and according to her 24-year-old twin sons, Edwin and Edrick Pierre-Pata, their mom still wakes up every other night crying, grieving over her youngest child, Bryan Pata, the University of Miami defensive lineman who was murdered six months ago today.
"She's still stuck thinking that Bryan will appear, come peeking out from around the corner. She still hears his voice, and every time it happens it crushes your spirit," said Edwin, the former Florida State tight end.
He had to leave his Tallahassee apartment to talk about his deceased brother because his mother was staying with him for a few days.
Talking about Bryan usually depressed Jeanette, who chokes up when she hears his name or anything about the Hurricanes. She was in Tallahassee because the NFL Draft took place the previous weekend and Jeanette knew all the buzz was going to be too much for her to avoid and handle.
Everyone who knew Bryan, from Miami Central High, knew he spent most of his life working toward and dreaming about the draft weekend. The signing bonus he anticipated was going to allow him to provide for his family, which had moved at least 20 times throughout his childhood because of financial struggles.
But those dreams ended on Nov. 7. An hour after leaving practice, Bryan Pata was murdered outside his Kendall apartment.The fun-loving, 22-year-old criminology major, whose world centered around his large family, football and tricked-out cars, was shot multiple times in the back of his head.
Instead of experiencing the highs and lows of draft weekend, Bryan, a two-year starter who was projected by some NFL Draft analysts as a potential mid-round selection, was buried Nov. 14 in the beige suit he planned to wear to his draft party.
His grave at Dade North Memorial Park lies across from the football field where he and his older brothers, Edwin and Edrick, who also played college football, grew up training, pushing one another to their limits.
Bryan's father, Junior Pierre, manicures the lawn every two weeks. Jeanette makes sure fresh flowers are always present, growing among the stuffed animals, balloons and a football with R.I.P. written on it. Edrick says every time he visits the grave he notices something new one of Bryan's friends has left, and for a moment, he smiles at the thought of how many lives Bryan touched.
The family plans to move him to a tomb 15 feet away when it finishes paying for the plot. The plan is for all the family someday to be buried around him.
Edrick said there's rarely a minute when he doesn't think about Bryan, and he knows he shares that habit with his siblings since the family's Sunday dinners haven't been the same.
A lot of the dinner discussions are about the investigation. Edrick admits he's obsessed with it.
"They have a lot of information, a lot of leads, but they can only tell us part of what's going on," Edwin said. "We try to fill in the other parts, but we've learned we can't do that."
A week ago, investigators told Edrick the case was starting "to heat up" with more leads. But after six months, there's no motive, no suspects and plenty of suspicion, despite the $25,000 reward for a tip leading to an arrest.
Jada Brody, Pata's girlfriend from West Palm Beach, and Dwayne Hendricks, Bryan's UM teammate who also shared the apartment, found his body just off the complex parking lot. According to Edwin, Brody mourned Bryan as much as the family did and has transferred from UM to Clemson.
Three Miami-Dade investigators call occasionally to update the family on the case and any leads. But when the phone calls stop and detectives take a few days to return messages, the Patas admit they become more discouraged.
Miami-Dade police refuse to discuss the investigation or details of Pata's murder.
"In open homicide investigations, we don't make a lot of comments so we don't take the chance of compromising the investigation," said Detective Mary Walters, a spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade Police Department. "The need to know could run the risk of jeopardizing the case."
The family hired private investigator Greg Slate, hoping he would lead them to something relevant. But Edwin wasn't pleased with Slate's few discoveries and said Slate hasn't been in touch with the family after being featured in HBO's Real Sports segment about Bryan's murder. Attempts to reach Slate were unsuccessful.
Edwin Pata said if Bryan had died in a car accident or by something health-related, his death wouldn't be so unsettling. He suspects the family would have grieved, remembered and "maybe eventually coped." But with Bryan murdered execution style, the family has had a more difficult time.
Edwin, who graduated from FSU last spring and is working on a master's degree in educational leadership, said the only hope he has for closure is finding the killer.
Edrick has theories that his brother was killed by some element of "organized crime." He bases that off the police questions, and things people have told him, but won't elaborate.
"It was premeditated murder. They plotted on my brother," said Edrick, who played receiver at Division II Virginia Union. "They watched him. Someone knew and studied Bryan to the fullest, to the point where they knew what time he leaves practice, the route he took, when he gets home, where he parks his car."
Edrick pointed out that Pata's Infiniti QX56 SUV, a truck his brother-in-law helped him buy, wasn't stolen. Neither was his jewelry, nor the $700 Bryan had in his pocket that day to pay bills.
"They only wanted to kill Bryan," Edrick said. "In the process, they've destroyed my family."
If you have information about the murder of Bryan Pata, call Crime Stoppers, anonymously, at 305-471-TIPS (8477).
Omar Kelly can be reached at okelly@sun-sentinel.com.
Copyright © 2007, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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In the Heart of a Great Country, Beats the Soul of Hoosier Nation
The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpts from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987, Simon & Schuster:
In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I," John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.
At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accomodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accomodated...
Hallandale Beach Blog
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
Sadly for its residents, Hallandale Beach is where even the easily-solved or entirely predictable quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and the unsatisfactory management and coordination of resources and personnel.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in cartoons, 10-21-06 Non-Sequitur by Wiley, www-NON-SEQUITUR.COM
Miami Dolphins
Sebastian the Ibis, the Spirited Mascot of the University of Miami Hurricanes
Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders, April 28, 2007
Of cheerleaders past and present
Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women in the photo above are surely what most South Floridians would consider attractive women. But for this observer, who's spent hours & hours at IU cheerleader tryouts and who has known dozens of cheerleaders -and wannabes- in North Miami Beach, Bloomington, Evanston and Washington, D.C., the whole time I was watching these members of the Dolphins' squad perform, I couldn't help but compare them and their routines to those of some IU friends of mine who ALWAYS showed true Hoosier spirit & enthusiasm.
Sitting at my table right near the stage and still later, while watching the long lines of Dolphin fans of all ages waiting to snap photos of themselves with the cheerleaders, I couldn't help but think about those friends who always left me and other Hoosier fans feeling positive & optimistic.
Was there anyone I saw in Davie who possessed these valuable intangibles: the dancing precision of IU Red Stepper -and Captain- Gail Amster, my talented and spirited Phi Beta Kappa pal from Deerfield (IL), who always sat next to me in our Telecom. classes as we took turns entertaining the other; the ebullient spirit & energy of two Hoosier cheerleaders -and captains- from Bloomington, Wendy (Mulholland) Moyle & Sara Cox; the hypnotic, Midwestern, girl-next-door sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable Southern girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a clear distraction while sitting underneath the basket?
Nope, not that I could see. But then they were VERY tough acts to follow!!!
And that's not to mention my talented & spirited friends like Denise Andrews of Portage, Jody Kosanovich of Hammond & Linda Ahlbrand of Chesterton, all of whom were dynamic cheerleaders -and captains- at very large Hoosier high schools that were always in the championship mix, with Denise's team winning the Ind. football championship her senior year when she was captain -just like in a movie. That Denise, Jody & Linda all lived on the same dorm floor, just three stories above me at Briscoe Quad our freshman year, was one of the greatest coincidences -and strokes of luck for me!- that I could've ever hoped for.
You could hardly ask for better ambassadors of IU than THESE very smart, sweet and talented women. In a future SBH post, I'll tell the story of one of the greatest Hoosiers I ever met, the aforementioned Wendy Mulholland, the Bloomington-born captain and emotional heart of the great early '80's IU cheerleading squads, and the daughter of Jack Mulholland, IU's former longtime Treasurer. The acorn doesn't fall far from a tree built on a foundation of integrity & community service!
(After he retired, Mr. Mulholland was the first executive director of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County. I used to joke with Wendy that her dad's name was the one that was permanently affixed to the bottom of my work-study checks for years, while I worked at the Dept. of Political Science's Library, first, at the Student Building in the old part of campus, and then later, after it was refurbished, in magnificent Woodburn Hall, my favorite building on campus.)
In that future post, I'll share some reflections on Wendy's great strength of character and personality; my intentions of returning to Bloomington a few weeks before Fall '82 classes started, so I could help Wendy train and work-out to rehab her knee, so she'd feel confident in trying-out for the squad again, following a bad knee injury that'd left her physically-unable to try-out for the squad the previous spring, a big disappointment to those of us who cared about both Wendy and the team; my incredulity at, quite literally, running into Wendy while walking down a sidewalk one afternoon a few years later in Evanston, IL, when we were astonished to discover we were both living there, with me trying to hook on with a Windy City advertising agency, and Wendy then-attending Kellogg (KGSM) at Northwestern, right when the WSJ had named Kellogg the #1 Business School in the country.
I'll also share a story about Wendy performing a true act of kindness towards me in 1982, when I was having a real emergency, and she went above-and-beyond what I had any logical reason to expect. Yet, Wendy, along with her very helpful dad, Jack, came through for me when I was in a very bad time crunch. I've never forgotten Wendy's kindness towards me, and her true Hoosier spirit.
There's NOTHING I wouldn't do for Wendy Mulholland.
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