Bombshell new evidence in assassination of Microsoft executive, the missing star witness… and prosecutors’ eleventh-hour bid on the eve of murder-for-hire trial

There was a time when Duval County prosecutors thought Henry Tenon’s would be the most compelling – and damning – testimony presented in Mario Fernandez’s hotly anticipated trial.

Fernandez, 38, is being tried for his alleged role in the murder-for-hire plot which prosecutors assert was behind the 2022 shooting of Microsoft executive, Jared Bridegan, 33. Married to Bridegan’s ex-wife, Shanna Gardner, 39, Fernandez has been charged with first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony. An additional charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder was recently dropped.

It is three years since the March day when news broke that Fernandez’s one-time tenant, Tenon, 65, had confessed to being the gunman who shot Bridegan dead at point blank range. Fernandez was arrested one day later. Five months after his arrest, a grand jury indicted Gardner, for her alleged role in the plot.

Investigators claim that all three participated in the conspiracy, with Gardner, the ex-wife allegedly masterminding the hit after years of near constant litigation with her ex, Fernandez, allegedly approaching and paying the shooter and Tenon, allegedly acting as gunman. Both Gardner and Fernandez have pleaded not guilty.

For his part, Tenon initially accepted a plea deal in which he received a sentence of 15 years to life for first-degree murder in return for testifying against both Fernandez and Gardner.

The trial starts on Monday. But the jury in Jacksonville, Florida’s Duval County Circuit Court will not hear from this one-time star witness. Because Tenon has recanted amid mutterings of ‘false testimony,’ and withdrawn from the deal telling prosecutors: ‘I want a trial.’ He too has now pleaded not guilty.

And so, the man once viewed as the first domino to fall will be the last defendant tried. (Gardner’s trial is scheduled for September). But, while Tenon’s withdrawal is a blow to the prosecutors, it has not, they insist, derailed the case they are about to bring against Fernandez.

In fact, just last week the state dropped a bombshell, stating that they now have ‘overwhelming evidence’ that the gunman did not act alone. For the first time they placed two suspects at the scene of the crime.

Assistant State Attorney Alan Mizrahi said: ‘There’s a person that fled on foot, and a person that fled in a vehicle.’ A source familiar with the case told the Daily Mail: ‘I think this in the context of them dropping the conspiracy charge means they are now likely insinuating that Mario was not only part of the plot, but he was also there and present on the scene that night.’

The night in question, February 16, 2022, was Bridegan’s ‘date night’ with the two children with Gardner, twins Liam and Abby, then nine years old.

The arrangement was part of the shared custody agreement between Bridegan and Gardner that saw them split their time with the kids 50/50 in a week on/week off basis. The parent who did not have the children on any given week took them out to dinner for a Wednesday ‘date night.’

Bridegan was heading back to his second wife, Kirsten, 35, and their two children, Bexley, then two, and London, then seven-months. He was barely five minutes into his journey, less than two miles from Gardner and Fernandez’s home, when he stopped to remove a tire placed in the road on his usual route through Sanctuary Boulevard.

It was a trap, set to lure him out of his vehicle.

He was shot multiple times at close range next to the driver’s door of his Volkswagen Atlas. Bexley, strapped in her child-seat in the back of the car, witnessed it all.

The brutal crime, which took place in a quiet residential neighborhood and targeted a man who, family and friends said, had ‘no enemies’ sent shockwaves through the Florida beach town.

Kirsten, who spoke to her husband in a brief phone call just a minute before he was shot, described Bridegan as a ‘devoted father’ to all four of his children. Gardner too, it seemed, had moved on following the 2015 divorce. Bridegan remarried in 2017, Gardner one year later. 

But the Daily Mail quickly identified cracks in what seemed on first glance a picture-perfect blended family. Gardner and her children with Bridegan did not attend his funeral and instead her family held a separate memorial service some weeks later.

In a now deleted blog post, obtained by the Daily Mail, Bridegan’s former mother-in-law Shelli, 64, initially claimed that her daughter ‘and everybody who knows her,’ was ‘uninvited’ from the funeral.

She wrote: ‘After Shanna… was uninvited from Jared’s funeral services, Shanna and the twins planned their own celebration of life.’

Despite initial reports stating that Bridegan and Gardner’s divorce was amicably settled, court documents unearthed by the Daily Mail showed it was anything but and that, they had been locked in almost constant litigation for six years.

The court filings told a sorry tale of escalating tensions and increasingly vicious allegations leveled, for the most part, by Gardner against her ex-husband.

It was Gardner who filed for divorce in February 2015, after five years of marriage on the grounds that the relationship was irrevocably broken. She told the court quite simply: ‘We don’t love each other anymore.’

In her original petition she accused him of threatening to withdraw funds from their children’s trust funds which, she claimed, were in his name.

The funds were set up by Gardner’s parents, Sterling Gardner, 76, and Shelli, who are hugely wealthy after Shelli co-founded Stamp Up, a direct sales company specializing in stamps with an annual turnover of more than $100million.

Bridegan denied his ex-wife’s allegations regarding the trust funds and the issue was quickly dropped but it was the first of many shots fired in numerous filings across the years.

At the start, neither party would move out of the family home with both demanding sole use of it and so, one filing notes, the relationship between them became increasingly strained.

In the filing Bridegan accuses his then estranged wife of locking him out of the master bedroom, installing surveillance devices in the children’s bedroom and his car and speaking to him, ‘in a disparaging manner in front of the children.’

He alleged that this was all an attempt on her part to ‘drive him out of the family home…in order to attempt to gain an advantage in this custody case.’

According to public filings, their son has a congenital heart condition that required specialist treatment in New York.

In June 2015, four months after Gardner filed for divorce, Bridegan accused his ex of ‘unilaterally’ cancelling a scheduled surgery to which he was due to take the child.

He also accused her of ‘engaging in conduct during his marriage in an effort to starve [him] into submission.’

The divorce was finalized in July 2015 but by November the couple were back in court, squabbling over the terms of the custody agreement which called for a 50/50 split.

By the following May, Bridegan had taken his wife to court filing a motion accusing her of contempt and calling for the court to enforce the custody terms by which, he claimed, she was not abiding.

It was just the first of dozens of filings dominated by the issues of custody of the children, their healthcare, travel and schooling.

When Garner remarried in 2018, tensions escalated as, Gardner alleged, ‘The Father is currently insisting that the Mother’s new husband may not exercise overnight timesharing with the minor children when the Mother is away. He is additionally creating problems with the Mother’s new husband being involved on a more general basis with the minor children. However, he insists that his own new wife should be fully involved in the children’s lives.’

She branded Bridegan’s ‘interpretation’ of their custody agreement as ‘one-sided [and] dishonest.’

But if Bridegan expressed misgivings about Gardner’s new husband, he was not alone. A police report obtained by the Daily Mail shortly after Gardner and Fernandez married shows that he was the subject of an investigation into animal cruelty resulting in death.

A source who spoke to the Daily Mail on condition of anonymity explained that Fernandez was accused of shooting and killing a local cat with a BB gun.

According to the police report, the cat’s owners took it to the vet where BB gun pellets were found in its leg and abdomen.

The source said people in the neighborhood were ‘scared’ of Fernandez.

‘Mario was always having run-ins with people who fed the local strays. He was always threatening to kill them [the cats], and he had a BB gun with a scope that he said he would use on them,’ they said.

The Jacksonville Beach Police Department officer who wrote the report spoke with Fernandez at length and noted: ‘He stated that he was upset because there were people feeding stray cats…he said he had cats in his backyard, and it was making his dog bark in the middle of the night. Fernandez also said he tried putting pepper on the fence as well as shooting the cats with a BB gun.’

When the officer told him that would be considered ‘animal cruelty,’ Fernandez stated: ‘if it did not get better soon, he would take more “extreme actions.”’ The police officer noted he seemed ‘very aggravated’ during the conversation.

Fernandez was not prosecuted as police attempts to follow up with him were unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the litigation between Gardner and Bridegan dragged on through the years, with the language in the filings becoming increasingly hostile and the allegations ever more outlandish.

Gardner alleged that Bridegan was guilty of, ‘disturbing and abusive behavior’ towards their children.

In a court filing in 2020, she claimed he had been ‘regularly interrogating the minor children and recording their statements.’ She stated: ‘It also appears that the Father is actively coaching the children what to say… [and is] now threatening to use these coached recorded statements against the mother.’

These actions are, she insisted, ‘clearly abusive both emotionally and mentally and an outrageous violation of shared parental responsibility as well as basic decency.’

In the last filing entered into the record just four months before Bridegan’s violent death, Gardner accused him of caring more about humiliating her than the life of his own son.

She accused him of withholding medical equipment – an oxygen machine needed by her son for travel above a certain altitude – unless she apologized for a host of ‘transgressions.’

The court document states: ‘The Father clearly considers his vindictiveness toward the Mother far more important than protecting his son’s life.’ She claims that he put in writing, ‘that he is more concerned with humiliating the Mother than he is in making sure his own child does not die’ and described this as ‘a shocking turn of events.’

Gardner ultimately lost her action calling for sanctions against Bridegan and, in only a handful of months, an even more ‘shocking turn of events’ occurred when Bridegan’s death drew a very firm line under years of constant and increasingly hostile litigation. This, prosecutors now allege, is the backdrop to the murder-for-hire plot of which Gardner, Fernandez and Tenon now stand accused.

Fernandez, prosecutors claim, is the only link between Tenon and the victim. He wrote three checks totaling $10,000 to Tenon in the two months after the murder.

And, while Tenon initially told officers that he had no contact with his former landlord, telephone records showed 35 contacts between the men in February (the month of the murder), 30 in March and further communications between May and June.

Yet, despite confidence in their case, one close to the prosecution told the Daily Mail: ‘I know for a fact they have been trying very hard to flip Fernandez and get him to take a plea deal and testify against Shanna.

‘She’s the one they really want in all of this. As far as they’re concerned without her none of this happens.’

The Daily Mail has reached out to attorneys for all defendants.