The ex-wife of slain Microsoft executive Jared Bridegan has moved 2,000 miles from Florida to the Pacific Northwest as investigators are about to announce an arrest is imminent in the unsolved murder, Fox News Digital has learned.
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Almost a year after becoming a father of four executed in front of his toddler, Bexley, in North Florida, Shanna Gardner-Fernandez quietly uprooted her 10-year-old twins with Jared and moved to West Richland, Washington.
When asked Monday to comment on the significant development in the case, she replied, “No, I’m sorry.” Minutes later, she was spotted driving her white Tesla in a supermarket parking lot, talking on her cellphone.
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Jared’s second wife, Kirsten Bridegan, with whom he shares 3-year-old Bexley and 1-year-old London, said she was stunned that Gardner-Fernandez had moved so far away.
“Honestly, I was shocked,” she told Fox News Digital in an interview Monday. “First the twins lost their father, then they were completely cut off from their own sisters and now they are being taken away from their school, friends, their sports teams. They are so isolated and that worries me.”
Jared had custody of the twins every other week, but Gardner-Fernandez ended all contact with his family shortly after his murder, according to Kirsten.
“It’s been an additional loss,” she said. “In addition to losing Jared, my children have also lost their siblings. I lost my stepchildren. I’ve been trying for months and months to make contact, but I’ve gotten nowhere.”
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Gardner-Fernandez, 35, and Bridegan, 33, divorced in 2016 — but they continued to fight over finances and custody of the twins in family court until his death on February 16, 2022.
A law enforcement source told Fox News Digital an arrest is expected as early as Wednesday, but he declined to comment.
Gardner-Fernandez and her second husband, Mario Fernandezremain suspects in the mysterious murder, according to a second source.
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After the murder, the pair retained powerful criminal defense attorney Henry Coxe III, who declined to comment on this story on Monday.
Less than a year after the children’s traumatic loss of their father, Gardner-Fernandez pulled them out of their private school in Jacksonville Beach and moved them into a six-bedroom, four-bathroom home in the Tri-Cities Area of Southeast Washington.
Property records show that the modern farmhouse was purchased for $1 million in September by Whitesand LLC, which lists the Alpine, Utah address of her parents, Shelli and Sterling Gardner.
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Shelli Gardner founded the paperwork company Stampin’ Up, which has estimated annual revenues of more than $100 million a year, according to IncFact.
Her parents are prominent in the Mormon community known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
They were in West Richland for the past week to visit their daughter and grandchildren – and attended a solo service at a local LDS church on Sunday.
Jared was a devout believer. Gardener-Fernandez drifted away from religion after their 2010 marriage and then reportedly had an affair, which led to their acrimonious split, Fox News Digital previously reported.
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Her second marriage also falters. Shortly after the murder, neighbors said they stopped seeing Fernandez at 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 put up for sale on Oct. 27 and then pulled from the market on Jan. 3, public records show.
Gardner-Fernandez’s main connection to West Richland appears to be a friend she met at a baking conference in 2020, Marla Rogers, who owns the house next door.
Rogers runs Marla’s Cookie Co. from her home, just as Gardner-Fernandez ran her own shuttered baking business, Beach Baked 904, from her Florida home.
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Gardner-Fernandez made a brief appearance Sunday in a video Rogers posted to her business Instagram page.
While Rogers is cleaning up after teaching a cookie decorating class, Gardner-Fernandez enters her kitchen wearing a shirt that reads “Please don’t make me do anything!”
Jared was shot in Jacksonville Beach on February 16, 2022 after taking his twins and Bexley, then 2, to dinner. The software engineer had just dropped the twins off at their mother’s house when he came across a tire on the one-way street.
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He got out of his Volkswagen Atlas to move it and was shot repeatedly by an unknown assailant as Bexley watched from her car seat.
“She has good days when she’s happy,” Kirsten said. “But it’s going to be a lifetime for her to process those feelings and the trauma of what she’s been through.”
Few details have been released about the investigation, a joint effort between the Jacksonville Beach Police Department and the State Attorney’s Office for the Fourth Judicial Circuit led by Melissa Nelson.
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Early in the investigation, police asked for the public’s help in identifying a dark blue Ford F-150 captured on surveillance footage near the crime scene, and there is a $55,000 reward for information leading to an arrest leads.
Kirsten said she and her daughters are trying to heal, but New Year’s has been particularly challenging.
“We ended the last year of being a complete family and started a whole new year without those memories or Jared in them,” she said. “That was very difficult.”
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