On February 16, 2022, Jared Bridegan, a 33-year-old Microsoft manager, dropped his twins at his ex-wife’s house in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, with his two-year-old daughter still in the back seat of his car. Driving home, he found a tire blocking the road. He stopped to move it. A man stepped out of the darkness and shot him dead, feet from his own car, with two rounds passing through the vehicle near his toddler.
It took nearly a year to make an arrest, and the case that followed has taken more than four more years to even partly resolve. This video covers the custody battle prosecutors say is the real motive; the blue Ford F-150 pickup truck and the financial trail of checks and phone records that led investigators to Henry Tenon; Tenon’s arrest, guilty plea, and 2023 sentencing to 15 years, followed by his 2025 recantation and the 2026 withdrawal of that plea; the March 2023 and August 2023 arrests of Mario Fernandez Saldana and Shanna Gardner, the victim’s ex-wife and her new husband; what Florida’s first-degree murder and solicitation statutes actually require prosecutors to prove; the August 2026 trial that convicted Fernandez Saldana alone, including the phone records, financial evidence, and a document prosecutors said he drafted trying to frame Bridegan’s widow; and where the case stands now, with one man facing a mandatory life sentence and two more people, charged with helping plan the killing, still five months from their own trial.
Related reading:
No well-reviewed book has been written about this case specifically yet. Rather than pad this section with a famous true-crime title that has nothing to do with it, here is an honest, case-scoped Amazon search:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Jared+Bridegan+murder+for+hire+true+crime&tag=truecrimecases-20
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Subscribe for a new documented case every day.
#truecrime #truecrimecommunity #coldcasefiles #bridegan #jacksonville #murderforhire
Leave a Reply