The ex-wife of slain Microsoft executive Jared Bridegan has moved 2,800 miles from Florida to the Pacific Northwest as investigators are about to announce that an arrest is imminent within the unsolved murder, Fox News Digital has learned.
Nearly one yr after the daddy of 4 was executed in front of his toddler, Bexley, in north Florida, Shanna Gardner-Fernandez quietly uprooted her 10-year-old twins with Jared and relocated to West Richland, Washington.
When asked Monday to comment on the numerous development within the case, she responded, “No, I’m sorry.” Minutes later, she was spotted in her white Tesla in a food market parking zone, speaking on her cellphone.
Jared’s second wife, Kirsten Bridegan, with whom he shares 3-year-old Bexley and 1-year-old London, said she was stunned Gardner-Fernandez had moved to date away.
“Truthfully, I used to be shocked,” she told Fox News Digital in an interview Monday. “First, the twins lost their dad, then they were completely cut off from their very own sisters, and now they’re being taken away from their school, friends, their sports teams. They’re so isolated, and that’s what concerns me.”
Jared had custody of the twins every other week, but soon after his murder, Gardner-Fernandez ended all contact together with his family, in accordance with Kirsten.
“It’s been an added loss,” she said. “On top of losing Jared, my children have lost their siblings. I’ve lost my step-kids. I even have tried for months and months to make contact and have gotten nowhere.”
Gardner-Fernandez, 35, and Bridegan, 33, divorced in 2016 — but they continued to battle over funds and custody of the twins in family court until his death on Feb. 16, 2022.
A law enforcement source told Fox News Digital that an arrest is predicted as early as Wednesday but wouldn’t elaborate.
Gardner-Fernandez and her second husband, Mario Fernandez, remain suspects within the mysterious killing, in accordance with a second source.
After the murder, the couple retained high-powered criminal defense lawyer Henry Coxe III, who declined to comment for this story Monday.
Lower than one yr after the youngsters traumatically lost their father, Gardner-Fernandez pulled them out of their private Jacksonville Beach school and moved them right into a six-bedroom, four-bathroom house within the Tri-Cities area of southeastern Washington.
Property records show that the trendy ranch home was purchased in September for $1 million by Whitesand LLC, which lists the Alpine, Utah, address of her parents, Shelli and Sterling Gardner.
Shelli Gardner founded the paper-craft company Stampin’ Up, which has an estimated annual revenue of greater than $100 million a yr, in accordance with IncFact.
Her parents are outstanding fixtures within the Mormon community referred to as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
They were in West Richland this past week visiting their daughter and grandchildren — and attended a service solo Sunday at an area LDS church.
Jared was a devout adherent of the religion. Gardener-Fernandez drifted from the faith after their 2010 marriage after which allegedly had an affair, triggering their acrimonious split, Fox News Digital previously reported.
Her second marriage can also be faltering. Shortly after the murder, neighbors said they now not saw Fernandez on the couple’s $1 million Jacksonville Beach home, which they co-own, and he didn’t join her for the cross-country move.
It was listed on the market Oct. 27 then taken off the market Jan. 3, public records show.
Gardner-Fernandez’s primary connection to West Richland appears to be a friend she met at a baking conference in 2020, Marla Rogers, who owns the house round the corner.
Rogers runs Marla’s Cookie Co. out of her house very like Gardner-Fernandez operated her own now-shuttered baking company, Beach Baked 904, from her home in Florida.
Gardner-Fernandez made a temporary appearance Sunday in a video Rogers posted to her company’s Instagram page.
As Rogers is seen cleansing up after teaching a cookie decorating class, Gardner-Fernandez enters her kitchen wearing a shirt emblazoned with the phrase, “PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME DO STUFF!”
Jared was gunned down Feb. 16, 2022, in Jacksonville Beach after taking his twins and Bexley, then 2, to dinner. The software engineer had just dropped off the twins at their mother’s house when he encountered a tire within the one-way road.
He stepped out of his Volkswagen Atlas to maneuver it and was repeatedly shot by an unknown assailant as Bexley watched from her automotive seat.
“She has good days where she’s joyful,” Kirsten said. “Nevertheless it’s going to be a lifetime for her of processing those feelings and the trauma of what she went through.”
Few details have been released concerning the investigation, a joint effort by the Jacksonville Beach Police Department and the State Attorney’s Office for the Fourth Judicial Circuit led by Melissa Nelson.
Early within the probe, police asked for the general public’s help identifying a dark-blue Ford F-150 captured on surveillance footage near the crime scene, and there may be a $55,000 reward for information resulting in an arrest.
Kirsten said she and her daughters are attempting to heal but Recent 12 months’s was particularly difficult.
“We ended the last yr that we were a whole family and began a wholly recent yr that is not going to have those memories or Jared in them,” she said. “That was very difficult.”
