Two women cling to each other as a truck rumbles by them in a quiet South Florida cemetery. They are standing near a 6-foot-high granite mausoleum befitting a University of Miami football player who lived large and died young. A verse from Psalms 16:8 is etched in the stone: “I have set the Lord always before me: Because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”
But on this day in 2018, nearly 12 years after Bryan Sidney Pata died, his remains are about to be moved.
Nelly Pata, his sister, scans the graveyard. She has come to support her mother, Jeanette, a demure woman who raised nine children mostly by herself and has been in and out of the hospital with heart issues in the years since her youngest son’s death. But Nelly is also on the lookout.
Her brother’s killer is still out there somewhere, and someone has been leaving ritualistic items, including dead chickens and a goat’s head, in the cemetery. A worker found a wine bottle with a dead bird stuffed inside near Pata’s tomb. His name was on the bottle.
