The NFL Draft, The Funeral, and The First Goodbye
In April 1996, on Monday morning, I gave notice to a job I loved, my first full-time job as Assistant Sports Information Director (SID) at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
By the end of that week, a brutal murder changed everything.
I planned to leave the U to join a start-up Internet company called SportsLine USA in Ft. Lauderdale, which eventually became CBS SportsLine. I was excited. My new job was to run the online college newsstand, working with the editors of the college sports magazines covering many of the biggest programs in the country as they determined how their valuable content would work on the Internet. In 1996, these were difficult decisions, and the path forward was unclear.
In my current job, as Miami’s baseball SID, I ran the press box at home games, travelled with the team on road trips, worked with media covering our nationally ranked team, and promoted them when necessary. I was also the keeper of all statistics and notes pertaining to Miami baseball.
The team was 25-7 after losing two-out-of-three at top-ranked Florida State in Tallahassee over the weekend. We arrived home Sunday night, and I walked into my boss’s office the next day and gave notice. I would work the home baseball series that coming weekend vs. No. 1 Florida State (Miami was ranked 13th), travel with the baseball team to Knoxville for a three-game midweek series at the University of Tennessee, and return for my last day in the office on Friday, April 19.
Over 3,400 fans piled into Mark Light Stadium for game 1 on Friday, a big crowd for college baseball 30 years ago. It was an intense game in the April Miami heat. Gazing at the box score of that 6-2 Miami win, it’s littered with future major leaguers like Pat Burrell, J.D. Drew, and Alex Cora.
My postgame routine as the baseball SID, after any media commitments were completed, was to lock up the press box in the stadium, which sat on the corner of the Miami campus on San Amaro Drive, and drive back down the block to the SID office. Our offices were carved into the side of the huge athletic department building, the Hecht Athletic Center, which was a few football fields away from the campus dorms.
Once I made it back to the office, I spent the next few hours manually updating what would today be called advanced metrics statistics, updating the game notes and player bios we would provide for the TV and radio broadcasts, and make all the copies necessary to be ready for the next night’s game. If I could get it all done late into the night, I would sleep in, take some time for myself before coming into the office around 3 pm on Saturday to grab everything and head to the stadium to open the press box. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Even as a short timer, I enjoyed every minute of it.
When I locked up the office around 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning and walked into the quiet Coral Gables night to my car for the one-mile drive home to my converted garage apartment off of a house, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
NO ONE SHOULD WAKE UP THIS WAY
The call came early, especially considering my late night. The signature 1990’s push button phone’s screaming ring shuddered through the small apartment around 8:30 am. “Come into the office as soon as you can,” the voice said (I don’t mean to be mysterious here; I just don’t remember who called me). “Something’s happened. Just come in.”
I do remember the pit in my stomach as I rushed myself awake and alert and dressed and out the door. “Something’s happened.” What does that mean? Did someone die? A co-worker? The drive seemed like 100 miles as I dreaded what I was walking into.
Upon arriving, the worst was confirmed. Two dead on campus. University of Miami linebacker Marlin Barnes and his friend, Timwanika Lumpkins, were found in Barnes’ dorm room. News reports called the cause of death “an apparent beating.” Police said it happened between 5 a.m., when they left Miami Beach, and 7:30 am, when they were discovered by Barnes’ teammate and roommate Earl Little. Barnes died on the scene, and Lumpkins a short time later in the hospital.
Here’s a short summary of the tragic and complicated saga. Labrant Dennis, Lumpkins’ ex-boyfriend and father of her child, was arrested a month later for beating both Barnes and Lumpkins to death after breaking into Barnes’ dorm room. In 1999, Dennis was convicted and sentenced to death on two counts of premeditated murder. His death row sentence was overturned in 2017, and in November 2025, Dennis, now 53, was spared the death penalty for life in prison.
The rest of Saturday was a blur. The campus was reeling. Everyone was in some degree of shock. Two people had been killed on campus in a dorm room. A 210-lb., 22-year-old man in top physical condition was beaten to death. There was a dangerous murderer on the loose. Were we even safe?
THEY PLAYED THE GAME
The University President, Edward “Tad” Foote decided during the day that University events would go on as scheduled, including that night’s Miami-FSU baseball game, invoking “that even in death, Barnes and Lumpkins would probably want their peers to celebrate life.”
Miami won the game Saturday night, 9-8, with over five thousand in attendance, and frankly, I don’t remember any of it.
My role as the baseball SID would take me wandering around the stadium, which I enjoyed since sitting still was never one of my better skills. I’d leave the press box above the third base dugout, head down the stairs and up the steps in the aisle between the rows of bleachers to the radio and TV broadcasters perched over the stands behind home plate, bounce back down those same stairs to the first base home dugout to check in with Head Coach Jim Morris and his staff, who once in a while would need something from me during the game, to the VIP box above the Miami dugout (more stairs).
I remember stopping in the stands at one point during the game to talk with the football team’s chaplain, Steve Debardelaben, trying to make sense of caring about a baseball game and even playing one at all in the middle of this horrible tragedy.
Miami also won Sunday, 7-4, to complete the sweep. This Miami team eventually went to the final game of the College World Series, taking a one-run lead into the bottom of the ninth inning, only to lose to LSU on a two-run home run by Warren Morris off Robbie Morrison. Some things you don’t have to look up.
A quick detour for the media junkies: That same weekend, Greg Norman blew his six-shot lead in the final round of The Masters on Sunday, as Nick Faldo captured the Green Jacket, followed by the 100th running of the Boston Marathon on Monday, Patriots’ Day. A look back at the Miami Herald sports section that weekend was a sight to behold, and also a sad reminder of an era that has ended.
The trip to Knoxville spared me the trauma of the week in Coral Gables. I missed the on-campus memorial service, which was gut-wrenching and sad. The baseball team arrived home on Thursday night.
ONE LAST ACT
On Friday, we had a surreal, quiet goodbye department lunch for me. I was sad to leave, excited for this new opportunity, and still in shock that two people were murdered not far from our office, only a few hours after I left it, and one of them was a football player we had worked with for the past few years.
The next day was Marlin’s funeral, held at New Birth Baptist Church in North Miami. Current players spoke, and former coaches and players came back to attend. Funeral greetings are always awkward, “Great to see you,” “Wish it were under better circumstances.”
That day was also the first day of the 1996 NFL Draft, being held in New York City. Miami’s linebacker Ray Lewis, one of Marlin’s closest friends and arguably one of the best football players to ever wear a Miami uniform, was set to be a first-round draft pick.
Lewis skipped the funeral. Dan LeBatard wrote in the Miami Herald that he skipped the funeral, “to attend a celebration. It was the hardest decision he has ever made, harder even than skipping his senior season to become the NFL’s youngest player at 20, but Lewis bowed to his mother’s wishes.”
“She told me not to go to the funeral because how you see somebody the last time is how you remember them,” Lewis told LeBatard in the column. “I don’t want to remember him laying down, all cut up. I want to remember him living.”
Lewis was drafted 26th by the Baltimore Ravens in the first round that day. He went on to a Hall of Fame career, one that included both tremendous success and very public controversy, and it was well-documented that he often wore a shirt under his pads with Marlin Barnes’ face on it.
I went to the Miami baseball games that weekend, including Sunday, to help with the transition, say some goodbyes, and, honestly, because I just enjoyed being there. I also didn’t want my last act at the U to be attending a funeral.
There was no time to think about what I’d just been through. At 27, it didn’t even occur to me to take a step back, maybe take a week off, and process.
The next day, Monday morning, I woke up and commuted north up I-95 to start my new job at SportsLine USA, diving into a start-up on the bleeding edge of this new technology called the World Wide Web.