Jared Bridegan's Widow Now Faces Contempt Over One Refusal

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:11)
Mario Saldana on trial for the murder of Jared Bridegan, the conspiracy to murder Jared Bridegan, his lovely wife, Shanna. She's on deck next. This is almost like the, it's the appetizer to the main course, if you will. Well, Mario, getting his day in court. At 9.3 on the morning of August 21st, Judge London Kite halted a first-degree murder trial in the middle of cross-examination. She stopped it to deal with Kirsten Bridegan, who's the widow of Jared the man. The defendant is accused of having killed. Kirsten had been ordered to hand her phone to the court by 9 a.m. so data could be extracted for the defenses team of Shanna Gardner, the ex-wife charged alongside Mario Fernandez and Jared Bridegan's death. Kirsten refused. Judge Kite granted her an order to show cause, which means Kirsten must now stand in front of a judge and explain why she shouldn't be held in contempt of court. Jared was ambushed and shot in February of 2022, the whole reason we're talking about this, with his two-year-old daughter strapped in the back seat. Four and a half years later, the person facing a contempt threat in the Jacksonville court room was his widow. Fernandez, the man accused of arranging the killing, watched his own trial pause for all of it. That was one fight over one phone. August 21st held three of them and by the end of the day, every fight in this case had become the same fight over who controls what a phone remembers. Gardner's lawyers want specific material off of Kirsten's phone and the reason starts with the children. Jared and Gardner's two kids are listed as witnesses in these murder trials and Gardner's team told the court, Christian has exchanged thousands of messages with them. The defense wants to know whether any of it shows influence over child witnesses who may end up testifying in the case against their own mother.
A second deposition gave the defense more. Gardner's team says it showed Christian in on-going contact with other witnesses and one of them identified in court papers as EF told a defense investigator she wouldn't speak with him without Christian's permission first. To Gardner's lawyers, it's evidence the widow may be pressuring witnesses. The approved subpoena is built around that theory. Certain messages with the children's communications or the EF activity on the justice for Jared social media accounts and certain contacts with attorneys and law enforcement. Christian attorneys call it a fishing expedition and argue she's protected by Marcy's Law, Florida's constitutional amendment, giving crime victims privacy and freedom from harassment. Prosecutors warn that granting it could teach every future defendant to demand a victim's private life just by alleging bias. Her lawyer put the stakes plainly.
No case law anywhere makes a murdered man widows hand over her phone to the defense. Judge Kite named the line this fight sits on if Christian were solely a victim. Kite said she doesn't know that she would have granted a subpoena, but Christian is also a witness and Gardner's constitutional right to challenge the witness against her forced the decision. Kite built in a filter, reviewing the extracted data in her chambers before anything reaches the defense, and she offered Christian the chance to strip out private material herself. Her lawyer said no. Kite has heard this dispute across at least seven hearings, and her answer? The bench was blunt. I have ruled. So the 9 a.m. deadline came on August 21st and the phone didn't. Kite gave Christian 30 minutes to comply, then set a lunchtime hearing to decide whether the widow at the center of this case would be held in contempt. Christian's lawyers went over her head to the Fifth District Court of Appeals. Instead, that afternoon, the appellate court granted a stay. The order froze. The contempt hearing died on the calendar, and Kirsten got three business days to make her full argument. A hearing in Gardner's own case was canceled in the fallout. The widow kept her phone by a matter of hours. Well, that fight buried and burned through the courthouse. The jury upstairs spent the day learning what happened to a different phone.
An ATF agent who spent years as an intelligence analyst for the ATF came to the stand. Prosecutors called her to walk the jury through records for Fernandez, Henry Tennant, Shanna Gardner, and a friend of Fernandez named John Biggerstaff. Tennant is the tenant from Fernandez rental property on Potomac Avenue. And prosecutors say Fernandez hired him to leave a tire in a dark road, wait for Jared to stop and get out and then shoot him.
The state put a chart in front of the jury tracking contact between Fernandez and Tennant across 2022 According to the courtroom record, it showed 26 communications in January and 37 in February. The month Jared died, then the line falls. 32 in March, 21 in April, 9 in May, 5 in June, 2 in July. By August, the chart showed zero. Prosecutors say the records caught one moment inside that slide. On March 9th, police released photos of the blue truck seen leaving the murder scene. The next day, for the state's records, Fernandez and Tennant were on the phone together for 27 minutes. The defense went after every bar on that chart. Tennant rented from Fernandez and handled his landscaping. Roughly 30 contacts a month between the landlord and a working Tennant is ordinary communication. When the truck photos went public, there were no bursts of panic calls. Council pointed out Butler conceded the limit of her own analysis, agreeing that gaps in phone activity don't implicate anyone. I can only say that there are gaps.