Paula Levine

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.

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

The story was more than 10 years old, and it was about the unsolved murder of a University of Miami football player, Brian Pata.

Is it unusual for police departments to pitch stories to ESPN?

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.

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 nondescript, fluorescent-lit room.

Detectives in ties and police officers wearing tan uniforms stood in rows.

In front of them, at a table, sat a family, Brian Patta's family.

Yes.

Brian's mom, Jeanette Pata, wore a colorful striped blouse.

In her hands, she gripped a magazine with Brian, her 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.

This is not easy for me because 10 years and a half, we don't hear nothing.

I don't think even they're working the case anymore.