Juju Chang

It's the Paradise Podcast.

What's up?

Mommy kept all of these.

Mommy was so happy when she got this jersey.

Oh, my god.

We're preparing, we talk about it.

If the family hadn't pushed, if there was no 2017 press conference with Jeanette Pata, if there was no involvement of ESPN, would we even be at this point?

The former UN football player accused of killing a teammate charged with second-degree murder at his arraignment today, Jones has pleaded not guilty.

The first substantive thing that happens in his case is a bond hearing, which is in 2022.

One of the most interesting things about the Bond hearing was that we finally got to see, for the first time, Paul Connor, the writing instructor from Miami who claimed that he saw someone matching the description of Rashawn Jones leaving the apartment complex after the shooting.

The bond hearing lasted a few days, and at the end of it, the judge set Rashawn's bail at $850,000.

But his family couldn't come up with the portion needed for bail, so he remained in the Metro West Detention Center in Miami.

Time passed, and four years after his arrest, Rashawn was still in jail, waiting for a trial.

I got contacted by Rashaun because another client referred him.

I went to see him at the jail, and he told me a little bit about his case, about the fact that it had taken 15 years.

So when I came onto the case, the witness list that the state had filed was very incomplete.

I realized that there was a lot left to do in terms of deposing these witnesses and also tracking down other witnesses who the state was saying they had never had contact with.

In the summer of 2025, the state attorney's office comes to a hearing and says something that is pretty shocking, which is they can't locate their main eyewitness, which is Paul Connor.

They couldn't find him.

They said they had run him in all the records databases, and we kept pushing and asking for evidence of this.