Missing Baylor Basketball Player’s Body Believed Found

Investigators searching a remote, abandoned gravel pit outside Waco, Texas, discovered a body believed to be that of Baylor University basketball player Patrick James Dennehy II, who has been missing for six weeks, authorities said Saturday.

The body was found Friday night, and investigators began combing the scene at “first light” Saturday, said McLennan County Sheriff Larry Lynch. The body, which was at least partially submerged in water and “badly decomposed,” was removed from the site and taken to a medical examiner’s office in the Dallas area, Lynch said.

“This is not a good sign,” said Debby De La Rosa, whose daughter Jessica had been dating Dennehy for two years and had discussed marriage with the player. Debby De La Rosa spoke in a telephone interview from her home in Albuquerque, where her daughter is a scholarship track athlete at the University of New Mexico.

An autopsy was scheduled. Although official confirmation of the body’s identity had not been announced late Saturday, officials said they suspected that the body was that of the 21-year-old Dennehy.

Dennehy’s friends and relatives have clung to hope that he might be found alive but said Saturday that their dream was fading.

“There might be a miracle,” said Jessica De La Rosa. “It might, miraculously, not be Patrick. We just don’t know. And so we’re just waiting.”

No identification was found at the scene, Lynch said.

The body was discovered by a sheriff’s deputy about five miles southeast of Waco, the central Texas city that is home to Baylor University, the world’s largest Baptist college.

The precise location had not been searched previously, but nearby areas had been searched in recent weeks. Sheriff’s officials are believed to have returned to the gravel pit in recent days after conversations with the suspect in Dennehy’s death, Carlton Dotson, 21.

Dotson, who is Dennehy’s former roommate, teammate and friend, has been charged with murder and remained jailed Saturday near his hometown of Hurlock, Md., without bond.

According to a Waco police affidavit, Dotson has confessed to shooting Dennehy, although Dotson’s attorneys have questioned that assessment.

Dennehy, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and recently transferred to Baylor after beginning his college career at the University of New Mexico, has been missing since mid-June.

According to another Waco police affidavit, released shortly after his disappearance, an anonymous informant told police that Dotson and Dennehy had gone to a rural stretch of Texas outside Waco to shoot guns together.

The affidavit said that Dennehy, once stripped of his scholarship at New Mexico because of his temper, pointed his gun at Dotson that afternoon “as if to shoot him.” Dotson shot his roommate in the head with a 9-millimeter pistol, the informant told police.

Dennehy had complained to friends and associates that he felt threatened in the weeks before his disappearance.

Increasingly, Jessica and Debby De La Rosa have been steeling themselves for word on Dennehy’s fate by spending time with his family, particularly with his mother and stepfather, Valorie and Brian Brabazon, Jessica De La Rosa said.

“It makes it better to go through all of this all together,” she said Saturday evening. “My mom and Patrick’s mom have been sitting here talking about us. It’s nice. Patrick’s mom said we were a match made in heaven.”