We Visited Death Row for the Super Bowl. You Can Help Save This Fan's Life.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pablo Torre
4.7 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A wrongfully convicted football fan is running out of time. So Pablo travels from the free world to Texas, to sit with Charles Flores for the one hour a day when he's not in solitary confinement. To learn what it feels like to watch the NFL through the bars of a super-max prison. To understand why Charles continues to await execution, a decade after the real killer went free. And to find out how the road might go on, before it's too late.
• Sign the petition to stop the execution of Charles Flores
• Previously on PTFO: Watching the Dallas Cowboys on Death Row
"The Road Goes On Forever" written and performed by Robert Earl Keen, with permissions from Songs of Universal, Inc., and Keen Productions.
(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. |
| 0:02.5 | I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. |
| 0:07.4 | Sooner or later, the truth's going to come out. |
| 0:10.9 | And I'm going to have that opportunity to see life after this. |
| 0:21.3 | Right after this ad. |
| 0:23.7 | Back to this ad. Back when I was a magazine reporter, and this was many years before I locked myself inside the PTFO studio in New York City, |
| 0:48.0 | I loved spending time on the road, just driving around this country. |
| 0:53.7 | But one place I had never been before is a town in East Texas called Livingston. |
| 0:59.7 | Livingston is the home of the Polonski Unit, a Supermex prison that is otherwise known as Texas's |
| 1:07.7 | death row. |
| 1:10.1 | You may recall that we sent PTFO correspondent Dave Fleming to this place back in October |
| 1:14.7 | 24 because we wanted Dave to find out about the apparently enormous role that football |
| 1:19.6 | fandom plays for the inmates here. |
| 1:22.6 | The men whose last words before state execution sometimes even wind up being shoutouts to their favorite |
| 1:28.8 | NFL team, which, in a sense, says everything. But today, more than a year later, and ahead of |
| 1:38.4 | Super Bowl Sunday, it is my turn to meet our guide to a fandom that is truly unlike any other. |
| 1:45.0 | A remarkable inmate by the name of Charles Don Flores. |
| 1:51.0 | A person you can hear right now as he's walking down the hall to the Polensky Unit's visitation room. |
| 1:57.0 | This surreal place with a painting of Cookie Monster on the wall behind me, |
| 2:02.4 | an Erie's Star Wars mural across the way, |
| 2:06.3 | and a thick pane of glass which forever separates the inmates from their kids, |
| 2:12.4 | their family, their visitors. |
... |
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