College Football Player Trent DiGiuro Was Murdered in 1993 — What Happened to His Killer?

In 1991, Trent DiGiuro graduated from South Oldham High School in Crestwood, Ky. He hailed from Goshen and, come the fall, DiGiuro was heading for the University of Kentucky, where he would be a walk-on offensive lineman. He loved football and worked hard to earn playing time.

Just two years after he stepped onto the field at Commonwealth Stadium, he was helping his team get to the Peach Bowl.

DiGiuro's love of football extended beyond its physical benefits. He valued the discipline he got from playing the sport. Off the field, he was an excellent student, earning a place on the 1993 Southeastern Conference All-Academic Team.

The summer before DiGiuro's senior year, three days before his 21st birthday, he was fatally shot in front of his off-campus home. It took years to capture the man who did it. Where is Shane Ragland now? Here's what we know.

Almost 30 years to the day of Ragland killing DiGiuro, he was back in court facing charges of assault (domestic violence) and terroristic threatening, per LEX 18 News. Ragland allegedly used his wheelchair to run into his mother as well as a friend of hers. He then threatened to kill them both.

"My mom has a serious case of dementia," said Ragland to the judge, who stopped him from speaking further. The judge gave Ragland a $4,000 bond and said if he bonded out, he could not go to his mother's.

That was in June 2024, a few weeks before DiGiuro would have turned 52. Following Ragland's arrest, the outlet reached out to DiGiuro's father, who met their phone call with a deep sigh. He informed LEX 18 News that their phone call did not surprise him. "He's [Ragland] been involved in several of these over the years," said Mike DiGiuro. "In Lexington and Louisville and San Diego, where he lived for a while ... every place he goes, he just seems to perpetrate these kinds of crimes."

DiGiuro's story was shared in a 2019 episode of Dateline. The popular true crime series interviewed several of the late footballer's friends and family, including his childhood pal Peyton Turner.

"Everyone called him a big teddy bear," recalled Turner. "He was the great protector of all of our friends." Unfortunately, he couldn't protect himself on that warm summer night in July 1994.

DiGiuro had people over at his parents' house to celebrate his upcoming birthday. Antonio O'Ferral, DiGiuro's roommate and the team's quarterback at the time, was going to bed when he heard a loud bang.

"You started to hear the chaos outside," he remembered years later. "The screaming, the yelling, the crying." Out front, DiGiuro was still sitting in a chair on the porch, but he was hunched over and bleeding.

He was pronounced dead at 3 a.m.

The beloved football player's murder remained unsolved for five years until his father made a plea to the public in his local newspaper. He was looking for any information that might help solve his son's murder.

A year later, Mike got it. A woman came forward, explaining that one year after DiGiuro's death, she was at a bar with her then-boyfriend when something odd happened.

She asked him what the worst thing he's ever done was. "I killed Trent DiGiuro," he said. She didn't want to believe it was true.

The woman worked up the courage to tell a friend, who gave police her ex-boyfriend's name: Shane Ragland. He was at the University of Kentucky at the same time as DiGiuro.

She agreed to a sting operation in which Ragland confessed remorse for the crime. Apparently, he thought DiGiuro got him blackballed from a fraternity. Though Ragland was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, that was overturned, and he pled guilty to manslaughter.

He served five years in prison.