Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Lying in Wait - The Homicide of Jared Bridegan

Episode Date: February 5, 2023

On the evening of February 16th, 2022 Jared Bridegan is dropping off his daughter at his ex-wife’s home. On the drive over he has to stop because there’s a tire in the middle of the road and he cannot go around it. He steps out of the car to go and move it whereupon he is shot multiple times. Henry Tenon has been charged with Bridegan’s murder. His only known connection to Bridegan is that he is a former tenant of a property owned by Bridegan’s ex-wifes current husband. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the longevity and complexity of this case, the logistics of the shooting itself, the charges against the suspect, the evidence found from the tire and shell casings, and much more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:18 - Background and overview of the case 3:25 - The logistics of the shooting 6:25 - Charges against the suspect 10:00 - Tenon’s truck  11:15 - Evidence from the tire 13:15 - Car rims and fingerprints 15:40 - Planning and pre-meditation 20:20 - The choke point and Florida climate  24:55 - Shell casings 30:15 - Video surveillance and tracking down the owner of the blue truck 32:45 - The longevity and complexity of this case 35:00 - OutroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Imagine, if you will, you've spent the weekend with your children. You're having to take them back home to their mother with whom they live. You've got your other child in the back of the car because they wanted to ride along to be with their siblings. Then all of a sudden, in the darkness, there's something in the middle of the road that causes you to stop. You don't see a way around it. You open the door, and the last thing you hear is a loud explosion.

And you are no more. Today, we're going to talk about the homicide of Jared Breidigan. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. Joining me today again is my pal Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, we've been looking at Jared's case now for, Lord, over a year, I guess. And suddenly, we've got movement in this case. We do. There has been an arrest made in the murder of Microsoft executive Jared Breidegen. He was killed in front of his two-year-old daughter on his way to drop off, as you said, his twins to his ex-wife who lived not too far away. They had a regular routine of drop off and pick up so that they shared

custody. Henry Tennant is accused by police of gunning down the 33-year-old father. We know that Breitigan was shot. He was on his way home after dropping the twins off, and this is a one-way street that he is coming down, and it is a route he routinely took after dropping his twins off with his ex-wife. His daughter is in the back seat. There is a tire in the roadway, again, one-way street, and the tire is in the middle of the road. He cannot go around it. There's not enough shoulder on either side to go around this tire. So he stops, gets out to move it, and at that point, he is shot. The two-year-old who was in the back seat, Bexley, comes home when she's returned to her mother, which is Jared Breidigan's now wife,

Kirsten, and she tells mommy, daddy on the ground. So this child has a memory of what happened. Before we talk about the evidence that led to an arrest, remind me of what would have happened to Breitigan when he was shot. Where was he shot? What was his wounds? And is it likely that he died instantly? It would seem that this went down pretty quickly, Jackie, that he was killed in place. And the one bit of information that the police have released in this case relative to his injuries is that they were at close range. Now, what we do know is that it was they talked about that there were multiple gunshot wounds, but they have found multiple casings on the ground pretty much adjacent to his remains. They've been very nonspecific about the absolute anatomical location of these injuries. But he was essentially found deceased immediately outside of the car.

So it's not like he ran some great distance. And right you were when you mentioned little Bexley in the back of the car. She was close enough that the shots rang out in her ears. She could actually hear them at that moment in time. And she also talked about her father going down. So you have to really wonder, as this goes to proximity, did she actually hear her father impact the ground in her own two-year-old little mind? Is that something that she has a memory of? Remember, she says, boom, boom, daddy on the ground. So it's one thing to hear gunshot wounds, but to actually hear her say, Daddy on the ground, does that mean that she heard him impact the ground?

Or did she actually witness, or maybe a combination of both, him going down? And it happened immediately outside of the car, Jackie, right adjacent to this little baby strapped in that car seat. She's only two years old. Police estimate that the little girl sat in the back seat for at least three minutes before a passerby called 911 and police. The suspect in this arrest is Henry Tennant, T-E-N-O-N. And again, he is accused by cops of gunning down the 33-year-old father of four. When the announcement of a pending arrest was made, the first thing people expected was that the suspect was going to be his ex-wife, and that is Shanna Gardner Fernandez.

After the divorce, Gardner married a trainer, Mario Fernandez. Now we find out that Shanna Gardner Fernandez has moved across the country without her husband, without Mario Fernandez. Learning that it was not the announcement that most people suspected, and again, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, police charged Tennon with, among other things, conspiracy to commit murder. But that's not all. What were his charges, Joe? We come to find out that he's charged, first off, with second-degree murder with a weapon. All right. So that means when you break that down, you begin, and it's kind of self-explanatory, but you can murder someone without a weapon.

All right. So they're specifying that in this charge that it was a second degree murder. It wasn't like he choked somebody. So he had a weapon that he used to facilitate the death. And then here's what's very interesting about this to me is that he is charged with conspiracy to commit murder. If you have a conspiracy, that means that you don't just have one person. You've got one, two, maybe three people that are attached to this event.

So people are conspiring to enter into an agreement to perpetrate a homicide. In addition to that, and this goes to the position of Bexley, and you remember we're talking about what she heard and maybe what she saw. This other charge is actually child abuse. And then he's also charged with being an accessory after the fact. So, we have the facts of the case here. We know that we have a death that is at his hand. He hasn't been proved guilty yet. But he has an awareness. He has knowledge of this event.

This all according to the prosecutor's office. So they've got a lot of information on this man. Specific tiebacks. And let's think about how long did it take them to bring all of this together? They have been taking their time because I think a lot of people, you know, when we've talked about this case on air in the past, particularly with Crime Stories with Nancy, we really thought, I think many of us thought that this case was going to be turned around and solved very quickly, but it has taken a long time.

And I don't think that it was necessarily because they didn't have leads. I think that they had to put all of the pieces together. They had the pieces, they just had to begin to put them together, and they wanted to make sure that they had a rock-solid case. One thing that we need to remember, just because he is charged with conspiracy to commit murder does not necessarily link him back to the ex-wife. Don't be making that assumption because right now all we know is that police believe there was a conspiracy, but they're not naming anyone that they thought might be in on this. Shannon Gardner Fernandez has adamantly stated and denied any role in Jared Breidigan's death.

Henry Tennant had a rap sheet. He was actually staying with a roommate who described him as a quiet, hardworking man, but he also recalls four separate police visits to their home after Tennant was arrested on unrelated charges last August. He said police kicked down the door at least one time. They turned the whole place over. They were looking for a gun, his truck. They took all of his clothes. The roommate says he was also taken in for questioning and grilled for about four hours for any information that he knew about Tennant's role in Bridegan's death. Of course, he said he had no idea about what was going on. What I find interesting about

learning this is the role of this truck that they were looking for, because we did have reports of a blue truck being spotted near the scene of Bridegan's murder. The truck is going to be key in this case, I have no doubt. And we've been hearing about this for many, many months now, that they have CCTV footage of this. And the footage that was released was kind of blurry. I really wonder, as this investigation has progressed, if they were able to kind of tighten down those images a little bit. Maybe they had other views of this vehicle. Perhaps they sent clips that they had to another agency for them to kind of refine them so that they could use them better to identify this vehicle. What we do know is a specific make. They were looking for a Ford

F-150. And that is going to lead back, I think, to a key piece of evidence in this case. And this goes back to the tire. People keep talking about the tire that was in the roadway that initially blocked Jared's progression down the road. And we have to keep in mind something here. And this is, again, a major, major bit of evidence. The fact that it's not just a tire. I keep hearing reports in the media, and I read them over and over again, where they keep saying tire. It's not

simply a tire. Okay, what does that matter? Well, it matters tremendously because this is a tire that's set on a rim. And so, not only do you have a tire that from an equipment standpoint can be tied back to a particular type of vehicle that would take that size tire, but you also have a rim that has pre-drilled holes in it that attaches on to the lug bolts that are fixed on a vehicle. So it can be mounted that way. And that's very specific. You'll have manufacturer marks there on a rim, not to mention the markings that are on the tire.

And so forensically, when you begin to look at this thing, you think, well, what's going to make this particular item or items, if you refer to the rim and the tire together, what's going to make them unique? Well, first off, you have to look at the manufacturer. You have to look at the date that these things were produced. When you go to the tire itself, you begin to think about, well, how much wear is there on this tire that's there? Because it was a worn tire. This image is all over the Internet.

You can see that it has been well worn. It's covered in dust, and it will have a specific wear pattern. If you have a tire like this that has a specific wear pattern, that wear pattern might be very distinctive to the vehicle that it was used upon because the alignment on the vehicle might be wrong. You might have tires are not necessarily going to match perfectly if it's a replacement tire. And so it's going to cause this vehicle to drive in a very particular way. So you've got multiple points along here that can tie it back to a specific car. I will continue to be watching this very closely because I want to know if this ties back to Tennant's

vehicle. This specific tire, did it originate out of the bed of his truck? And, you know, we haven't even unpacked more specific forensic evidence that goes back to, say, the rim itself. If I understand what you're saying, there's enough evidence here besides touch DNA to link Tennant to this murder. I think that probably touch DNA is the least of these in this particular case. And yeah, it might very well be there. And if it is there, bully for them. I'm happy that they have that. Listen, to our listeners, I would urge anybody with your vehicle, if you have a vehicle, go outside and take a look at the rim. That's the inner portion of your wheel there on your vehicle. And you'll have brake dust that's on there many times. And it's this kind of gray dust. That is a perfect sourcing for latent prints, believe it or not. So, if he put his hand on that rim itself, okay, just feature this for a second, on that

rim itself and just dropped it off in the middle of the road, his print might very well be there. And that's pretty fascinating when you begin to think about that, that he could have left a print in the dust on that tire, on the rim itself. And when you look at the images that are floating around out there, you'll see this thing is just crusted with dirt. So that's a potential that's there. If there's grease on the backside of that rim, you can leave behind what's referred to as a plastic print. And that means that when you have grease or oil and those sorts of things, and you apply your finger to that area and you pull it away,

you'll actually leave a print in that grease or whatever else is there as well. Grease, oil, that sort of thing, road deposits, carbon buildup. Think about when we were kids, if you had a substance like Play-Doh or Silly Putty or something like that when you were a kid and you press your finger down onto that surface and you pull it away, well, that's what a plastic print looks like. You actually have it frozen in that for just a second when you're a kid and you can kind of stretch it and play with it and that sort of thing same principle here with this rim he very well may have left a print there so you know that tire is going to be an absolute just bevy of data for them to examine and perhaps to tie back to this fellow An examination of this case, it offers up more than just simply a tire. There's a lot of forensics that they have in this case, in my opinion, and things that have led to an arrest.

And I think, personally, have led to an idea that maybe there was a conspiracy afoot in this case. I'm interested in talking about and backing up to talk about the scene again, not just the tire and the truck. There were some very specific points that you would have to know it's a one-way street, would have to realize that there is not enough room for two cars, and knowing that the landscape around him would not support going around this tire. So there actually was a little bit of thought put into this. That goes to an element of premeditation. And let's kind of put this into military terms, because you mentioned the word ambush earlier,

Jackie. You know, the military will go out and recon an area, conduct reconnaissance. And I think that that's probably what happened here, because the geography, and I'm talking about the physical landscape out here, is very particular. First off, you have to identify the fact that Jared Bridegan took a specific route to and from his home to convey his children to his ex-wife's home. It's the route that he chose. It's maybe the most direct route to get back to his home. But what's so compelling about this is the fact that along this way, there's a one-way stretch. And this one-way stretch is very narrow. And when I say narrow, there's narrow when we begin to think about maybe a street in the city where we've got sidewalks on both sides and those sorts of things. But in this context, you're talking about

the environment in Florida. And when you take a look at the way the land kind of lays, on one side of the road, you've got this low-growth vegetation with a few trees in this area that would be perfect for concealment, covering concealment. Palmetto bushes are in there. You see some old growth oak that look like they're sitting in the back back there, maybe a few pine trees. And then on the other side, you've got this depressed area that kind of slopes away from the road and it looks very marshy, wet. So if you've got an element in the middle of the road that is impeding your ability to pass through the area, you don't have a choice.

You have to get out and remove that item because you can't go up on either shoulder of the road because you might run off into the weeds or you very well might go off into the swampy area and get stuck. And this is not like he was driving a gigantic four-wheel drive truck. This is a Volkswagen platform that sounds as though that it's kind of one of these quasi-SUV type, small SUV type vehicles. He would not have the ability with this vehicle to essentially just kind of climb over the tire. It's not going to pass him the vehicle.

He is compelled at this point in time by virtue of this item in the road to get out and remove the tire. So what does that do? Well, as soon as you do that, you become very vulnerable to anyone that wishes to do you harm. You're outside the confines of the vehicle. You don't have a door or even a windshield that is protecting you in any way. So once you have stopped the vehicle, and if I remember correctly, when he stopped the vehicle, he put his flashers on. He had the presence of mind, put flashers on, exit the vehicle, opens up the door in order to get out there to remove this impediment. And it's at that point in time that he's essentially executed. Executed. Let me say that word again. Executed in the middle of the road right there.

It just wasn't one shot. It's not like somebody randomly fired out of the woods or something. No. Someone was up close on him because they have mentioned the term close range, and they've mentioned the term multiple shots. As an investigator, you can automatically exclude anybody that just would have been randomly firing a weapon off in the distance, and this poor fellow happened to be on the receiving end of the round. No, no, no. That's not what happened here. Somebody specifically targeted him and essentially killed him in the middle of the road with his little baby sitting right there strapped in a car seat. Joe, you and I have had a lot of conversations, and one of the things that I tell you a lot

is that I am geographically challenged. I don't travel a lot, so I don't always know things about other regions. But I have learned through the years that the landscape in Florida is a little bit different. And one thing is you don't have a lot of base. So it's because of the water table and the water content in the soil in Florida. Given that he had to be stopped at a specific point, and the perpetrator set it up, I'm going to throw out the term choke point only because you have talked to me about that before. So this perpetrator set up a choke point knowing that the landmass surrounding where this stopped would not support the weight of a truck. Am I right?

You're absolutely on target. Again, using the term choke point, that's a military term. It's a point of vulnerability. If folks at home will just kind of envision a funnel and how a funnel narrows down, that's a choke point. You get to a point where it restricts movement. And if you're looking to ambush somebody, you want to get them in an area where they cannot defend themselves, they can't run away, it's narrowed down to that specific spot. So you've kind of got them captured at that moment in time, and you can do with them as you wish. What's kind of interesting about this, I think, is that if that theory holds water, which I believe that it does, you would have the perpetrator

standing on either side of the road. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that they would be on the side of the road, adjacent in that kind of semi-wooded area that kind of rises above. It slightly has a rise to it above the roadbed. You can look down on an area. And if you step down out of the shadows, no one's going to remember this is at night, and it's not a lighted area. Another reason to pick this area because the individual that you're trying to attack would essentially be blind to anything that's around them.

You don't have streetlights out there. So they could emerge out of the shadows once he has stopped that vehicle to remove the tire and fire upon him. In this case, fire upon Jared. But what's interesting is that this individual that would have perpetrated this would have had to have stood there for a while. And what happens when you stand in place, particularly on this soft, loamy soil? Any of us that have been to Florida know throughout the day, any time of the year, you can essentially get a rainstorm. So the soil many times will remain quite moist and very malleable. And so if he's standing in one place for a protracted period of time, just waiting and waiting and waiting for Jared to pass by, headed on his way home, there might be footprints out there. There could also

be evidence of activity in addition to footprints because you're trying to find a spot where you'd have broken vegetation, where you've got branches snapped off. Remember, there's a low growth brush out there as well. These palmetto bushes that I mentioned, other kind of grassy elements that are out there. People that are keen to this and are aware of what's going on, you can see where these items are either snapped off or pressed down into that area. And that gives you an idea of activity out there. You know, we think a lot in forensics about blood trails and all that stuff, but you can also get an idea as to what happened at a scene by virtue of where an individual was oriented relative to their shoes. And, of course, shoes are going to be very, very specific in this case.

And remember what you said earlier, Jackie, when they went out and they served the search warrant on this fellow's house, what did they get? Well, they went out there and the roommate says they yanked all of his clothes out of there. What are they looking for? I think clothes probably involves shoes more than likely. Maybe they've taken that all back. If they found footprints out there, they could have cast those. And if they have work boots or athletic shoes, or I don't care if it's Sunday go to meeting shoes, they're going to leave a distinctive print. And they can compare that back at the lab once they've lifted those cast out of the soil. And it'll give them an idea, or at least from a circumstantial standpoint that these shoes are

consistent with the prints that we found left behind at the scene In our world, there is no such thing as a perfect crime. Those do not exist. Some are more difficult to solve. But, you know, here's the thing. Perpetrators are always going to leave behind some essence of who they are or what they have done or what they brought into the scene. And I think that this case is no different. It's a bit more difficult to work because it's an outdoor scene. This is not like walking into a house or apartment somewhere where you're going to have a blood-soaked scene and you might have a lot of fiber evidence out there that you could find.

But still, significant evidence can be found out here. And I've got an idea about a few of these things, and I think that you're going to leave some trace behind. And I got to tell you, I think that there are several items that we have yet to discuss that could lead deeper and deeper into this investigation and point certainly to this perpetrator and maybe potentially to others. Let me see if I can guess what some of those things might be. We've talked about the tire and the possibility of prints. We've talked about possibly finding a nest or an area nearby where the perpetrator may have watched while waiting on his victim.

And we've talked about the truck a little bit. What about the possibility of shell casings there on the scene? Depending on what kind of a weapon you're using, the shell casings get ejected. You, unless you have lots of time to look, you may not necessarily know where it is ejected to. Were there shell casings found, Joe? Yeah, and I'm glad that you made that plural, casings. That's what the police have said over and over again. And I can tell you a big piece of this that we might can safely speculate on. This is probably going to be a semi-automatic weapon because you've got multiple ejected shell casings. Now it's possible that you could have

used a revolver and you can eject shells from a revolver with an ejection rod that you kind of, you open up the cylinder and you push them out and it drops on the ground. But those are becoming fewer and fewer nowadays. Most people are going to be carrying a semi-automatic handgun. And so, where you have shell casings that are ejected out of the side, people need to be very careful when you start to talk about the relationship between shell casings and, say, the decedent. That is the person that has passed away, the homicide victim. Many people will get an idea that when you see these ejected shell casings, it might be an indication of movement of the perpetrator as they're firing the weapon. That is a falsehood because you can have a distribution of shell casings all over the

place, particularly on a very solid, hard surface. Remember, this is on an asphalted surface in a road. So when those spent metal casings eject out of that ejection port and they hit the ground, it's anybody's guess as to where they're going to wind up. And they'll bounce all over the place. Even in an individual that stays static, that means stands still while they're firing, these spent casings can bounce all over the place. You can't even, there's no way to even do the mathematical computation that would be involved to try to make a guess at

to where one casing will land as opposed to another. So that shouldn't be an indication of movement of the individual, whether they were static or moving around. It's just going to give you an idea of an approximation as to where the perpetrator was. It sounds as though, based upon what the police have said, is that it was perpetrated very close to the open car door that Jared had stepped out of.

Remember, he put his flashers on, opened the door, and stepped out. And then, boom, boom. So you've got the shell casings that are lying about. Semi-automatic, we believe. And it will essentially go back to a particular weapon. Now, here's what the police are looking for. Hopefully, they can find this weapon because if they do and deepen it upon the track of the wounds and the rounds that passed into Jared,

if they recovered any of those rounds whatsoever, they can tie that back to the barrel. We've talked a lot about ballistics on body bags. So that's certainly something that would help us identify the weapon and potentially put it into the hand of the person that possessed it at the time of this crime. Also, you would begin to look at these aforementioned casings that have been spent because they have marks on them too. They have extraction marks. They have ejector marks.

It's soft metal. So as the process is happening where that round is being spent casing is being pulled out of the weapon by this force as it's flying through the air and just before it's literally grabbed within the weapon slid back and those markings are distinctive to that weapon that's important because not only if you get the weapon you can tie the projectile ballistically back to the weapon but you can look at the markings on the casing and tie that back to the same weapon you're not just looking at what's coming out of the barrel you're also looking at what's coming out of that ejection port as well, because those are very distinctive scientifically. Speaking of scientifically, how about something that we kind of take for granted every day and people kind of dismiss and don't realize how scientific it really is. And that is the likelihood of video

from every angle. I mean, you're going to have houses that are going to have doorbell cameras, you're going to have businesses usually are going to have some kind of surveillance cameras. So we know that it was reported that there was a blue truck. How do you think that they pinpointed or narrowed down on the truck that it belonged to Tennant? I got one better for you than just simply seeing the truck on video the night of. Remember how we talked about going out and reconning an area like the military would. What if they were able to put that truck out there during the daytime hours where it's passing through this area up and down the road, searching for that choke point, as we mentioned? What if they got that truck captured on video by RingCamp?

And look, I don't know how much folks know about this area, but this is a high dollar area where this took place. Now, I know that we made it sound very vacant, and it is in this particular area, but up and down this road, you've got homes that are far nicer than anything that I live in. Very, very high-end real estate. And what do high-end real estate owners tend to have on their homes? Well, they like security. I don't think that police are just simply reliant upon what happened that night. They're reliant upon what happened the days leading up to this event.

They may have gone to all of these homes up and down this road and said, well, sir, ma'am, can we pull your video footage here? We're looking in this case. We want to look back several days. Maybe they had an eyewitness. Maybe they saw a strange truck that wasn't part of that neighborhood. And somebody came to the police and said, you know what? There's been a truck that's been driving back and forth through here for the past week. We don't know who the guy is, but I heard about the description. I didn't see it that night, but man, a truck just like that's been driving up and down the road preceding the event. So that could be part and parcel of what the police are looking for as well or have identified in this particular case, certainly enough to create a search warrant perhaps, and then

finally an arrest warrant in this particular case. I think all the things that you've told us about today, Joe, really puts together and solidifies for people how long it truly can take to solve a murder case. I mean, we're looking at over a year now before an arrest was made in this case. Yes, we are. And God bless Jared's wife to go through what she's gone through with these children, day in and day out, wondering all of his family that have been so united in this case. And finally, they get this one ray of hope here because it has been an uphill struggle. And there's been a lot of questions that have been asked. And that doesn't go to the police don't know what they're doing. I take

exception anytime somebody says that. The police are being careful, particularly, you know, because the word conspiracy has come up in this case. That adds a whole other level of complexity to a case. That means that you just don't have one individual that you're looking at. You're looking at multiple individuals. So it increases it by a specific factor and it makes it very layered. You know, we haven't even touched on, certainly, I think maybe many of us kind of take it for granted. We haven't even touched on the fact that the perpetrator may have been carrying a cell phone with him. What if there were text messages that were going back and forth? What if he's pinging off of towers? For all I know, this individual left their phone at home, but just

what if, just what if they were lying in wait out there as Jared is traveling home to go back home to his precious family with that precious angel in the back seat, and he's sitting out there in those bushes waiting for him to come back. He's got his phone in his pocket. And all the while, all the while, they're able to tie it back to a specific perpetrator. And that thing is pinging off of those towers, giving them a specific identification and location as to where he was the entire time. You brought up the conspiracy again, Joe. So let me say it one more time. We are not jumping to conclusions.

No one has been named as a co-conspirator in this case no one has been arrested as a co-conspirator in this case so far has been henry tennon i'm joseph scott morgan and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.