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Mario Fernandez facing sex crime charges after conviction in Jared Bridegan murder

Mario Fernandez is now facing two charges of lewd & lascivious molestation that were filed this week after his conviction in the murder of Jared Bridegan.

By Francine Frazier, Associated Press

3 min. readView original

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – BREAKING UPDATE:

Mario Fernandez is now facing two charges of lewd & lascivious molestation that were filed this week after his conviction in the murder of Jared Bridegan.

According to Florida statute, lewd & lascivious molestation involves victims younger than 16.

The age of the victim or victims in Fernandez’s case has not been released.

Previous story below:

A man accused of arranging the fatal shooting of a Microsoft design manager on a Florida road was convicted Wednesday in a murder-for-hire scheme that followed years of a stormy child custody arrangement between the victim and his wealthy ex-wife.

Jared Bridegan was shot in 2022 after he got out of his SUV to remove a tire from a road in Jacksonville Beach. The attack stumped police for months as they struggled to understand why someone with no apparent enemies would be killed while his daughter sat nearby in her car seat.

Prosecutors believe he was killed because of ongoing strife with his former wife, Shanna Gardner, over the parenting of their twins.

Mario Fernandez Saldana, 38, was convicted of first-degree murder and solicitation of murder and faces an automatic sentence of life in prison. He’s married to Gardner, 39, whose trial is set to start in September.

“They wanted a majority of the decision making. They wanted more custody, even 60-40,” Assistant State Attorney Christina Stifler said during closing arguments Tuesday in Duval County court.

“It doesn’t matter if they were completely right about the situation or completely wrong. What matters is how they fixed it,” Stifler said. “They fixed it by executing a man when they had other alternatives available to them. That’s why we’re here.”

Prosecutors said Fernandez Saldana hired Henry Tenon to carry out the fatal ambush. He had no personal connection to Bridegan, but was a former tenant at Fernandez Saldana’s rental property in Jacksonville. The prosecutor described him as “basically homeless, squatting on people’s couches with overdrawn bank accounts.”

Jurors saw three checks totaling $10,000 written to Tenon after the homicide, marked as payments by Fernandez Saldana for handyman work and a business idea — “good luck!!”

Tenon’s DNA was identified on the rim of the tire that was intentionally placed in the road, police said.

He initially pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Fernandez Saldana but backed out and will stand trial in 2027.

Defense attorney Jesse Dreicer told jurors that Fernandez Saldana had no motive to have Bridegan killed. Fernandez Saldana and Gardner are estranged, and Gardner moved to Washington state after the killing. She was arrested in 2023.

“He certainly gained no benefit from the death of Jared Bridegan,” Dreicer said, noting there was no testimony that Fernandez Saldana told anyone that Bridegan “deserves to die.”

Gardner is the daughter of the co-founder of Stampin’ Up!, an arts-and-crafts company based in Utah.

Bridegan was shot twice when he stopped his Volkswagen Atlas to move the tire out of the way. He had just returned two children to Gardner’s home after a meal with the twins. At the time of his death, he was married to Kirsten Bridegan and they had two children.

Kirsten Bridegan told the jury that the post-divorce relationship between her husband and Gardner was “pretty terrible,” adding there was “absolutely no trust.” She said it interfered with the kids’ medical appointments and even routine meetings at school.

Bridegan was chief technology officer at Utah-based Clean Simple Eats before working at Microsoft for less than a year before his death, his wife said.

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Mass. woman who killed children granted new trial by SJC

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court said Judge William F. Sullivan was wrong to withhold details of Latarsha L. Sanders’s psychiatric history from the jury.

4 min. readView original

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court said Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan was wrong to withhold from the jury details of Sanders’s psychiatric history from the four years she spent awaiting trial in prison and in a state psychiatric hospital.

“We hold that the exclusion of the defendant’s relevant medical records relating to the diagnoses or treatment of mental illness constituted prejudicial error, and as a result, the defendant is entitled to a new trial,” Justice Frank M. Gaziano wrote.

“There is no doubt the defendant committed these incomprehensible crimes,” he noted. “The sole issue before a Superior Court jury was whether she lacked criminal responsibility.”

Cruz, whose office is currently prosecuting Lindsay Clancy for killing her three children, could not immediately be reached for comment. Clancy has pleaded not guilty and is mounting an insanity defense at her ongoing trial, asserting that she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness.

Sullivan is the judge in that case.

Sanders was sentenced to two life terms in prison without parole for each of the killings, a mandatory sentence, and another 9 to 10 years for lying to police during her videotaped interrogation, during which she was incoherent and struggled to stay awake.

Robert L. Shaw Jr., Sanders’s appellate attorney, welcomed the ruling.

“This case arose from an unimaginable tragedy that caused immeasurable loss and pain for many people, including Latarsha Sanders,” he said in a statement. “It also involved a fundamentally unfair legal proceeding — one that resulted in a sentence of life in prison for a mother who was suffering from profound mental illness and experiencing a psychotic state completely untethered from reality.”

Shaw called the decision a “testament to the safeguards built into our judicial system and to the fundamental principle that, no matter how grave the accusations, a conviction must be the product of a fair proceeding. We look forward to the opportunity for a new and fair trial.”

Her family said Sanders’s mental health had been declining for years. In interviews for a Globe series published last year, they described her worsening paranoia and her preoccupation with conspiracy theories. She stopped taking good care of herself and would spend hours in a room with darkened windows.

She did not seek treatment for these symptoms before the killings, and her family said in interviews they did not appreciate the severity of her illness.

For four years while awaiting trial, Sanders was treated for mental illness in MCI-Framingham. When her symptoms worsened, she was committed to the Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital, a state psychiatric facility. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorder.

During those years, medical professionals generated thousands of pages of reports documenting paranoid, bizarre behavior as well as periods of lucidity, the ruling stated.

According to the SJC, the jury did not see 12 medically significant entries in which Sanders was diagnosed with severe mental illnesses, was paranoid and said her soul was being sold to the devil, acted bizarrely by licking windows and staring at walls, and reported having auditory hallucinations since the birth of her first child.

In her opening statement and closing argument, Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Amanda Fowle told jurors that Sanders was “evil”, was playing the “crazy card,” and had crafted her “lies” based on episodes from the NBC television series “Law and Order: SVU.”

Fowle argued that the absence of records of Sanders seeking treatment for her mental illness before the killings meant she was not mentally ill at all.

“There is no evidence that anybody in 2018 … was so concerned about her mental status that they were concerned about those little boys,” she told jurors, according to a trial transcript. “Because the reality is, there wasn’t anything significantly wrong with her mental status when she killed those boys.”

The SJC said Sullivan undermined Sanders’s entire defense strategy when he concluded that prison and hospital records would not help the jury assess her mental status at the time of the killings, the central issue of the entire trial and her sole defense.

“Based on our comprehensive review of the medical records, however, we have no difficulty concluding that the exculpatory MCI-Framingham and WRCH [Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital] records far exceed those that called into question the defendant’s mental illness,” Gaziano wrote. “We hold that the exclusion of the MCI-Framingham and WRCH medical records ... impermissibly stripped the sole defense ‘of the medical foundation that supported it.’”

The SJC also found fault with the prosecution’s assertions about the Law and Order show and how Fowle framed that information during her closing argument.

When police searched Sanders’ Brockton home after the killings, a “Law and Order: SVU” episode was playing on a television. Fowle suggested without evidence that the TV show had given Sanders the idea to “come up with not the hallucinations, not the delusions, but the lies,” she told the jury.

The SJC said that while prosecutors are allowed some latitude in how they characterize evidence in their closing, Fowle went too far.

“The portions of the prosecutor’s argument relating to the television program were impermissible,” the ruling stated. “There was no evidence to suggest that the defendant watched episodes of the television program involving child murder and voodoo rituals or copied the plot lines.”

Starts at 35:49. Kouri looks rough and VERY pissed off 😂

Judges decision can be read here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fXaRiynMCE5WEFau1Qb1iw_Tmz1KHfhw/view

Ordered to pay a total of $171,500.00 to attorneys and $5000.00 for court costs. Judges order:

https://publicindex.sccourts.org/Hampton/PublicIndex/PIImageDisplay.aspx?ctagency=25002&doctype=D&docid=1783949412714-285&HKey=90711109777651171121106585741121228610910670721061115510583575611712150551114884549878815610665848348

Background on the story:

https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article316214237.html

Pretty sure this is new. I've followed this case closely from the start and I haven't seen this