GUILTY in the Jared Bridegan Murder-for-Hire, No Weapon and No DNA, and Lindsay Clancy's Jury Just Got a Manslaughter Option

A Duval County jury convicted Mario Fernandez Saldana of first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony Wednesday, after just under four hours of deliberation, in the February 2022 ambush killing of Jared Bridegan. Bridegan, 33, a Microsoft senior design manager and father of four, was shot after stopping to move a tire from a dark Jacksonville Beach road with his two-year-old daughter in the back seat. Prosecutors said Fernandez Saldana solicited Henry Tenon — his former tenant, recently evicted and with no money in his accounts — to kill Bridegan to resolve a custody fight and to allow his wife, Shanna Gardner, to become trustee of her family trust. The state had no murder weapon, no DNA and no eyewitness. Fernandez Saldana, 38, faces an automatic life sentence, with a sentencing date to be set October 5. Gardner has pleaded not guilty; her jury selection begins Monday. Also: after five weeks and 84 witnesses, the Lindsay Clancy trial went to the jury Thursday — and Judge William Sullivan granted the defense a manslaughter instruction over the Commonwealth's objection, giving jurors an option between first-degree murder and a finding of not criminally responsible. And in Las Vegas, prosecutors rested against Duane Davis after 25 witnesses.

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Speaker 1: Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and

Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher.

It's Friday, August 28th, 2026. We told you Thursday that

a jury in Jacksonville had the Mario Fernandez-Saldana case and

that we would have the verdict as soon as it came.

It came Wednesday afternoon, and it was guilty. Both counts.

First-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony in

the death of Jared Breidegen. Automatic life. In Plymouth, the

five-week Lindsay Clancy trial ended Thursday with closing arguments. And

before those arguments, Judge William Sullivan made a ruling that

reshapes everything. That jury is no longer choosing between murder

and a psychiatric hospital. They now have a third door.

And in Las Vegas, prosecutors rested their case against Dwayne

Davis after 25 witnesses and about eight hours of recordings

of the defendant. The last thing they showed that jury

was a video of Davis holding up his own book

and telling people to spend $ 20 on it. Let's get

into it. On the night of February 16th, 2022, Jared

Bridegan dropped his twins, Abby and Liam, at their mother's

house in Jacksonville Beach after taking them out to dinner.

He got back in his Volkswagen with his two-year-old daughter

Bexley strapped in the back seat and started for home.

On a dark one-way street, he found a tire lying

across the road, stopped, and got out to move it.

Four rounds were fired at him. Two of them hit him.

He died on the asphalt while his daughter sat in

her car seat a few feet away. And one correction

from our Thursday show, I told you he was shot

four times. Four shots were fired, he was struck twice.

The detail matters and I want it right. Jared Breidegen

was 33 years old, a senior design manager at Microsoft

and a father of four. For months, police could not

construct a motive. He had no enemies. His wallet was

not taken, his watch was not taken. It took 11

months to make the first arrest and four and a

half years to seat the first jury. On Wednesday afternoon,

that jury came back guilty on both counts. Mario Fernandez

Saldana is 38. He faces an automatic sentence of life

in prison, and he is due back in court on

October 5th to be given a sentencing date. And I

want to be precise about what that jury actually decided,

because it is a bigger legal statement than the headline suggests.

Nobody ever accused Mario Fernandez Saldana of firing a gun.

The state's own case was that Henry Tennant pulled the trigger.

What the state argued, and what this jury accepted, is

that under Florida law, a person who encourages, assists, advises,

or hires a killer is as guilty as the man

who fires. They accepted that with no murder weapon. It

has never been found. With no DNA belonging to Fernandez

Saldana on anything tested. No surveillance, no fingerprints, no hair

putting him in that truck or in Jacksonville Beach that night.

The lead detective conceded every bit of that on the stand.

So what did they have? Three checks. Roughly $ 10, 000 paid

to Henry Tennant after the murder, written for landscaping, roof repair,

and a business investment. One of them with a memo

line that read, Kickstarter, good luck. A tire found at

Fernandez Saldana's rental property matching the tire in the road.

Dozens of phone contacts. GPS data showing Tennant driving Breitigan's

exact route in the weeks before. And another correction from Thursday.

The defense closing was delivered by Jesse Dreiser, not James Hill.

Hill gave the opening. My error. Dreiser's argument was clean

and I understand why he made it. He told the

jury his client gained no benefit from the death of

Jared Breitigan. and that nobody had testified that Fernandez Saldana

ever said Breidgen deserved to die. The state's answer was

the trust. Prosecutors told that jury Shauna Gardner comes from money,

that her family had established a trust, and that she

could only become trustee of it once every legal entanglement

with Jared Breidgen was finished. Their theory was that Fernandez

Saldana solicited a man who had been evicted and had

nothing in his bank accounts, to solve a custody fight

and unlock a trust fund. Assistant State Attorney Christina Stifler

put the motive plainly. They wanted more of the decision-making.

They wanted more custody. And she told the jury it

does not matter whether they were completely right about that

custody dispute or completely wrong. You do not get to

solve a family court problem with a hired gun. And

I want to give you the shape of that trial

because the numbers are striking. Seven days of testimony. The

state rested Monday afternoon. The defense case took about half

a day and consisted of two witnesses, both of them

staff from the private school the twins attended, who testified

that Fernandez Saldana was a friendly, involved parent who came

to events and picked the children up and that everyone

knew the marriage was ending. Mario Fernandez Saldana did not testify.

That was his absolute right. And the jury was instructed

they could not hold it against him. And I still

think it was the correct legal call. Putting him on

the stand would have handed prosecutors the one living person

who could be cross-examined about those checks. But it does

tell you what the defense believed. They were not trying

to win by explaining. They were trying to win on

the gap. And the gap was not enough. After the verdict,

Kirsten Breidegen stood in front of cameras with her husband's

family and the state attorney's office. She thanked law enforcement,

the prosecutors, and the people who called in tips. She

said that when this started, she felt like she was

alone and that she quickly learned she was not. And

then she said this, truth won today and justice has

been served in part, in part. She said it deliberately

because this is one of three. Shanna Gardner is 39.

She has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and related charges,

and she is presumed innocent. Jury selection in her trial

begins Monday, three days from now, in the same county

that just watched her husband convicted of murdering her ex-husband.

Judge Kite refused to seal this verdict until her case

was over. He said it comes out when the jury

reaches it, and it did. Henry Tennant goes to trial

next year. He pleaded guilty in 2023, then withdrew the

plea and told the court his statements under it were false.

So nothing he said under that agreement was used against

anyone in this trial. Look, I'm going to be honest

with you about what this verdict says because it is

not really about one man. There is a version of

this crime that almost worked. Hire a stranger. Stay miles away.

Leave no DNA, no weapon, no witness. And then when

they charge you, stand up and say there is no

physical evidence. That is not a defense strategy. That is

the product being delivered. You paid for distance and then

you asked a jury to acquit you because the distance worked.

Assistant State Attorney Alan Mizrahi said it better than I

can in his rebuttal. He told that jury the absence

of physical evidence is not a hole in the case.

It is why you hire somebody else in the first place.

12 people in Duval County did not buy it. That's

not a mistake. That's a choice. And they made the

right one. And there is one more thing this verdict does,

which almost nobody is talking about. Henry Tennant withdrew a

guilty plea and said his own statements were false, which

took the state's cooperating witness off the board entirely. Prosecutors

went to trial without him and won anyway. That changes

the arithmetic for everyone still charged in this case and

it changes it four days before Shauna Gardner starts picking

a jury. Jared Breidegen was 33 years old. He had

four children. His two-year-old daughter was in the car and

heard it happen, and afterwards she told an adult that

something happened to her daddy. Four and a half years.

One conviction. Someone has to say his name. When we

come back, five weeks of testimony ended in Plymouth yesterday,

and Lindsay Clancy's jury walked into that room with an

option nobody expected them to have. On the evening of

January 24th, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with

exercise bands in the basement of their house in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.

Clancy then attempted to take her own life and has

been paralyzed ever since. Yesterday, that case ended. First, a

correction I owe you. I've been telling you this trial

ran more than 40 witnesses. The final count is 84.

74 for the prosecution, 10 for the defense, across 21

days of testimony. I was off by half and you

should have better from us. Now the ruling. On Wednesday

after the jury went home, Judge William Sullivan held the

charge conference. That is where the lawyers fight over what

verdict options actually appear on the paper the jury takes

into deliberations. It is boring, it is procedural, almost nobody

covers it. And it may end up mattering more than

every expert who testified in this case. Kevin Reddington asked

for a manslaughter instruction. Prosecutor Shane and Buckingham objected, and

her argument was that these children were strangled, which is

not a manslaughter fact pattern. Sullivan gave it to the defense.

He said he was inclined to give a single manslaughter

instruction rather than parsing between voluntary and involuntary. And that

is what he did. So here is what changed. For

five weeks, this jury was looking at a binary that

a lot of jurors find unbearable. Either you convict a

woman of first-degree murder and she dies in prison, or

you find her not criminally responsible and she goes to

a state psychiatric hospital. Nothing in between. Now, there is

something in between. If this jury cannot agree that the

Commonwealth proved first-degree murder, they have somewhere to go that

is not an acquittal. Reddington's theory for it was not insanity.

He argued that even if jurors reject the full defense,

that a mental disease or defect could still have affected

Clancy's ability to think, to react, to understand what she

was doing, enough to reduce murder to manslaughter. That is

a much lower bar than the one he has been

trying to clear all month, and Sullivan just handed it

to him. The defense did not get everything. Sullivan refused

a Bowdoin instruction, which would have told jurors they could

weigh the shortcomings of the police investigation. And Reddington had

spent Wednesday calling that investigation horrific, pointing at blood inside

the house, a window screen, and powder found in a

wine tumbler. None of it ever tested. Buckingham countered that

police documented the scene and that witnesses explained why certain

items were not tested, though she did acknowledge medications found

in a drawer were never flagged. Then came Thursday, one

hour aside. Jennifer Sprague closed for the Commonwealth, and she

made a choice that I think is going to define

how people argue about this case for years. She went

at the privilege. She told the jury Lindsay Clancy had

health insurance that covered multiple doctors, access to specialty programs,

18 weeks of maternity leave, a nanny who helped with

the housework, support at home, and then she said it.

This was not a woman suffering from a lack of

care or a lack of resources. That is a hard,

effective argument, and it is aimed squarely at the crowd

in pink outside that courthouse. The entire public conversation around

this case has been that the system failed Lindsay Clancy.

Sprague stood up and said the system gave this woman

more than most people in this country will ever get.

I understand the argument. I also want to say something

about it. Access is not the same as adequacy. You

can see six providers and still have every one of

them miss the thing that is killing you. The counter-argument

is not that she had no help. It is that

she had a great deal of help and it did

not work, which is a more frightening thought, not a

less frightening one. Reddington closed by going back to the

man he built his case on. He reminded the jury

that Dr. Philip Resnick, who testified in both Andrea Yates' trials,

is a leading authority on malingering, on detecting people who

fake mental illness, and that the prosecution's own expert agreed

he is a leading authority. Then he pointed out that

this expert on faking looked at Lindsay Clancy and said

she had a horrific mental disease or defect when she killed,

in his words, her beautiful children. That is the move.

You brought me three men who say she is faking.

Here is the country's expert on faking, and he says

she is not. And Reddington had one more thing working

for him, which is the sheer weight of what the

defense experts described. Not one of them said Lindsay Clancy

was a healthy woman who snapped. They described a mental

state deteriorating over months, made worse by a rotating set

of prescriptions, ending in postpartum psychosis, which is an uncommon

but real psychiatric emergency in which a new mother loses

contact with reality. That is not a fringe theory invented

for a courtroom. It is a recognized medical crisis, and

the argument between these experts was never whether it exists.

It was whether she had it on January 24th. There

is one more thing from Wednesday I want you to hear,

because it is the most human moment of this entire trial,

and it came from the prosecution's side. Reddington was cross-examining Dr. Sathoff,

the FBI psychiatrist. He walked him through everything Lindsay Clancy

did before January 24th. The internet searches about postpartum depression,

the visits to multiple maternal and mental health providers, telling

her mother she was suicidal, telling her husband she was

afraid she would hurt the children, calling a suicide hotline.

And then Reddington asked him essentially whether he believed Clancy

killed her children because she no longer liked the life

she had chosen, whether it was a selfish choice by

a woman manipulating her providers for a quick fix. Sathoff

would not take it. He told the courtroom that framing

minimizes what she was going through. That is the Commonwealth's

own expert, the man whose entire testimony is that she

is criminally responsible, refusing to call her selfish. I have

watched a lot of experts get led into a cheap answer.

He did not take it, and it says something about him.

The jury has the case. The standard is two-pronged, and

the defense only needs one. Either she could not appreciate

the wrongfulness of what she did, or she could not

conform her conduct to the law. The burden is on

the Commonwealth throughout, and Sullivan will have told them that

in plain language before they went in. And I want

to lay out honestly what is in front of those

12 people because it is genuinely hard. First-degree murder in

Massachusetts here means deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty.

Both sides largely agreed on that language. If they get there,

it is life without the possibility of parole. If they

find she was not criminally responsible, she does not walk

out of a courthouse. She goes to a state psychiatric

hospital under a commitment with periodic reviews to determine whether

she can ever live safely in the community, and those

reviews can go on for the rest of her life.

And now, in the middle, manslaughter, which is the option

that exists for a jury that believes something was profoundly

wrong with this woman, but cannot bring itself to say

she was legally blameless. Here is my honest read, and

it is only a read. The manslaughter instruction makes a

hung jury less likely and a compromise verdict more likely.

That is what middle options do. Whether a compromise is

justice in a case with three dead children is a

question I do not think I am qualified to answer.

And I'm not sure 12 strangers from Plymouth County are either.

But they are the ones who have to. There was

a line at that courthouse Thursday morning that reached the

parking lot. One writer got there at 6.15 in the

morning and lay down on the sidewalk to hold her place.

Not one empty seat. All of those people are waiting

on 12. Cora Clancy was five years old and in kindergarten.

Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old.

For five weeks, the country has argued about their mother.

Someone has to say their names. When we come back,

the state rests in Las Vegas, and the last thing

that jury saw was Dwayne Davis selling his book. As always,

we run Las Vegas a day behind, because court out

there is often still in session when we record. This

is where things stood as of Wednesday. Tupac Shakur was

shot at an intersection off the Las Vegas Strip on

September 7th, 1996, and died six days later at 25.

Dwayne Davis, known as Kefi D, is 63 and the

only person ever charged. He has pleaded not guilty. On Wednesday,

after a week and a half, prosecutors rested. 25 witnesses,

roughly eight hours of recordings of the defendant, drawn from

four separate occasions across two decades, all of them placing

him in a car next to Tupac Shakur that night.

And the state closed its case on two things you

should hear about. The first was a retired Compton police

officer named Robert Ladd, who spent years working gang homicides.

Ladd's testimony was not about ballistics or receipts. It was

about hierarchy. And it is the closest thing this prosecution

has to a theory of how a man who never

fired a gun is guilty of murder. Ladd told the

jury that Dwayne Davis was a shot caller in the

Southside Compton Crips and that he ranked about as high

as you can get. He described what that means. A

man who can tell younger gang members what to do

with severe consequences for anyone who does not listen. He

said younger members are supposed to do what they are

told without hesitation. And Ladd told the jury something else

that explains why this case sat unsolved for 27 years.

In his experience, gang homicides get solved by admissions because

the witnesses will not talk. Not because they do not know.

Because cooperating gets you labeled a snitch. And being labeled

a snitch in Compton in 1996 was a death sentence.

So the prosecution's own witness confirmed the thing that has

haunted this case for three decades. Everyone knew and nobody

would say it. And the only reason there is a

trial at all is that one man could not keep

his mouth shut for money. Then prosecutors walked him to

the point. Assume based on Davis's own admissions that the

Cadillac held four men, Davis, Terrence Brown, DeAndre Smith, and

Orlando Anderson. Who is the leader in that car? Lad

said Davis. Who is the shot caller? Davis. And could

Orlando Anderson, a younger, lower ranking member, have opened fire

with Davis sitting right there without permission? Lad said no.

He said if Davis had told them to handle it

another time, there would not have been a shooting. That

is the whole case in one exchange. Under Nevada law,

you can be held responsible for a murder you did

not personally commit if you intentionally participated in it or

helped it happen. The state is not arguing Davis pulled

a trigger. It is arguing that nothing happened in that

car unless he allowed it. Ladd also gave the jury

the aftermath, and it is worth sitting with. He testified

that Shakur's killing set off a 10-day war in Compton

between the Southside Crips and Mob Peru. Three people killed,

10 attempted murders. That is what nobody remembers about September

of 1996. One shooting on a Las Vegas street and

13 more families in California got the worst phone call

of their lives inside two weeks. Nobody was paying attention

to them. There is no documentary about them. Now, Michael

Samps got his hands on Ladd too, and he got

exactly what he needed. Ladd acknowledged that apart from Davis'

own admissions, he had no physical evidence placing Dwayne Davis

in Las Vegas that night. No phone records showing Davis

ordered a shooting. Nothing. So the state's expert on gang

hierarchy just told the jury that the entire structure rests

on a man's word about himself. And then prosecutors ended

their case with the second thing, which is either the

smartest choice they made or the strangest. They played the

jury a YouTube video. In it, Dwayne Davis holds up

a copy of his own memoir, Compton Street Legend, and

tells the audience they can get the real truth about

this whole situation. It's your $ 20, he says. That is

how the Clark County District Attorney's Office rested a murder case,

not on a weapon, not on a witness. on the

defendant on camera, monetizing the story he is now on

trial for. Then they played jail calls and they sat down.

After the jury left Wednesday, Judge Carly Kearney turned to

Davis and advised him of his right not to testify

and told him that if he stays off the stand,

prosecutors cannot mention it in closing arguments. She also noted

that if he does testify, the state is limited in

what parts of his history it can raise. essentially to

convictions from a jailhouse fight in December of 2024. Davis

has not decided. Think about that for a second. This

is a man whose entire legal problem is that he

cannot stop talking. Four recorded interviews, a memoir, a docuseries,

a YouTube channel, and now the one room where talking

would actually be under oath, and he is weighing it.

The defense case began Thursday. Sanft has said he plans

to call a detective and two Las Vegas police officers.

And you can see the shape of what he is

going to argue because he has been consistent since day one.

Sanft told this jury in his opening in a single

word on a slide that I am not going to

say on this show exactly what he thinks of his

client's statements. His position is that it took authorities 30

years to charge a man that the witnesses they called

have criminal histories of their own. and that the state

is now treating an embellished memoir as if it were evidence.

That last point is the strongest thing he has. Because

the state's case really is built substantially on a book

and a set of interviews given by a man who

was paid to give them, and who has since said

parts of it were invented. One more thing. Before the

state rested, Malcolm Greenidge, who recorded with Tupac as part

of the outlaws and called him a brother, described the

shooting itself for that jury. He said he saw an

arm come out of the back seat of a light-colored

Cadillac and open fire. He could not see a face.

Asked how he felt watching it, Greenidge said he was horrified.

30 years of theories, books, documentaries, and podcasts. And underneath

all of it is a young man in a car

watching his friend get shot and not being able to

do anything about it. Tupac Shakur was 25 years old.

Someone has to say his name. That's the show for Friday,

August 28th. If this was useful, send it to one person.

Word of mouth is the whole engine here. And if

you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment, because I want

to know what you make of that manslaughter option. Did

Judge Sullivan just give that jury a fair third choice,

or did he give 12 exhausted people an easy way out?

Tell me. The Clancy jury is deliberating. Shanna Gardner picks

a jury Monday, and Dwayne Davis is deciding whether to

take a witness stand. We will be here for all

of it. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes

on sourcing and timing. This episode was recorded before court

opened Friday morning. The Lindsay Clancy jury began deliberating after

closing arguments and instructions on Thursday and had not returned

a verdict as of recording. If a verdict came after

we recorded, this episode does not reflect it, and we

will have it in full. Two corrections carried in this episode.

We previously described the trial as involving more than 40 witnesses.

The final count is 84 across 21 days of testimony.

And we previously said Jared Breidegen was shot four times.

Four rounds were fired and he was struck twice. We

also incorrectly attributed the defense closing in Jacksonville to James Hill.

It was delivered by Jesse Dreiser. One clarification on the

mistrial motion we covered Wednesday. In denying it, Judge Sullivan

noted it was the witness, Dr. Heilbrunn, and not the

prosecutors who raised the subject of religion. Kevin Reddington's characterization

of the exchange as intentional misconduct was his argument to

the court, not a finding by the judge. On the

Jacksonville case, Mario Fernandez Saldana has been convicted and faces

an automatic life sentence, with a sentencing date to be

set October 5th. Shauna Gardner has pleaded not guilty and

is presumed innocent, and her jury selection begins Monday. Henry

Tennant has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent and

goes to trial next year. Nothing said at Fernanda Saldana's

trial is evidence against either of them, and testimony offered

outside the presence of that jury is not repeated here.

On Las Vegas, outlets differ on the running witness count,

with figures of 24 and 25 both reported. Allegations Dwayne

Davis has made in recorded interviews about living people never

charged in this case are claims made by a man

whose own attorney has told the jury he cannot be corroborated.

The jury has been instructed there is no indication Davis

had anything to do with the murder of Christopher Wallace.

This episode discusses child deaths, suicide, and postpartum mental illness.

If you are struggling, you can call or text 988

in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

For postpartum mental health specifically, the National Maternal Mental Health

Hotline is available by call or text at 1-833-TLC-MAMA. Postpartum

psychosis is rare, it is a medical emergency, and it

is treatable when it is caught. The overwhelming majority of

people who experience postpartum mental illness never harm anyone.