Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Dots with Joseph Scott more the word shocking is
used at Nauseaum. I think in a lot of the
cases that would cover intra crime and things that are
breaking in the news relative to in my world in forensics.
But there's a case I'd like to update you on
(00:25):
today and it has to do with a young thirty
three year old father who was trying to literally start
his life over again with a new wife and a
baby and completely destroyed this family. And it's the case
(00:52):
of Jerry Brdigan. And I think that it's important because
we do have updates this case, and so with that said,
I think that it's important that we try to get
into this and and understand what has happened since our
initial recording of body bags involving his death. I'm Joseph
(01:20):
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks Dave. This this case,
I got to tell you, it really hit home with
me because divorce is painful anyway, and you know, I've
had a blended family. You know, I don't think I'm
(01:42):
talking our school when I say you've had a blended family, right,
and so you you have this dynamic that goes on.
Life is tough enough otherwise. But when you have when
you have a young father that is essentially executed, and
I will use that term executed in the middle of road.
(02:02):
He was killed in place. And the one bit of
information that the police have released in this case relative
to his injuries is that they were at close range. Now,
what we do know is that it was close range
and that there were multiple of them. As a matter
(02:24):
of fact, not only have they talked about that there
were multiple gunshot ones, but they have found multiple casings
on the ground pretty much adjacent to his remains. They've
been very non specific about the absolute anatomical location of
these injuries. But he was essentially found deceased immediately outside
(02:46):
of the car, so it's not like he ran some
great distance. And right you were when you mentioned little
Bexley in the back of the car, she was close
enough that these shots rang out in her ears. She
could actually hear them at that moment, Tom, and she
also talked about her father going down, So you have
(03:08):
to really wonder, as this goes to proximity, did she
actually hear her father impact the ground in her own
two year old little mind. Is that something that she
has a memory of, remember she says boom, boom, daddy
on the ground. So it's one thing to hear gunshot wounds,
but to actually hear her say daddy on the ground.
(03:29):
Does that mean that she heard him impact the ground
or did she actually witness or maybe a combination of
both him going down. Boy, how shocking this embrace was. Yeah,
he was. This was truly set up, and we have
had some things that have developed along the way.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
It's funny, you know, I just hear and googled it.
I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna see what
pops up when I when I googled today, you know
where are we? And immediately there are so many stories
that pop up because over time, police reports come out
and things become public. You got your hands on the
autopsy report, which I'll be honest with you, Joe, I thought,
what can it show? And you were like, oh.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
This shows a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
The investigation into Brad again, you know, there wasn't arrest
of a man named Henry Tennon, and they said at
the time of his arrest that they, being the prosecutors,
he did not act alone and all along the finger
immediately was pointing back to his ex wife and her husband.
(04:36):
I mean, it was a blended mess, that's all I
can say.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
It really was. And boy, talk about a sordid cast
of characters. Yeah, you know, kind of this dynamic that
you've got going on. And you know, look, when you're
trying to establish a new life, you have a new
family now because for whatever reason, you know, you've busted up,
you know, in.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
This case show. It was really odd because in particular
where the Mormon religion, yes is it's a very involved
religion with the family, and the church becomes a center
of the family and everything that takes place. And Jared
and his first wife were both raised in the Mormon
(05:22):
church and were very active. When his first wife began
to pull away from the Mormon religion, that's when it
really began to get bad. That's when the divorce happened.
She was allegedly having an affair and anyway, they really
went different paths. He remained as a very devout Mormon,
(05:44):
she did not. So that immediately put the divorce and
children at I want to say, at risk for danger
because that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, it's very acrimonious at that point in Tom because
that you know, you're beliefs, your spiritual beliefs, or a lifestyle.
I mean, it truly is a lifestyle. It dictates and
it doesn't matter if you're Mormon or Catholic or whatever.
You know, you're you're going to get down this road.
And if you're living by the tenants of the church,
(06:14):
if you've got one individual that's not not on board, boy,
it's it's tough and so unequallyqually yoked. Yeah yeah, And
I'm thinking when I heard about this case initially, it
just it didn't sound right. And you know, we think,
I think that when we did the initial taping the
(06:39):
first episode of of of Jared's case, we didn't really
know a lot of the details relative to what was
found at the scene because you know, it had first
come out that it was a tire sound in the road.
Well it's not simply a tire. It's a tire with
a rim. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
You were told that he stopped the car. He had
gone here's the lay of the land, very quick.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Jared brid again and his ex wife, they were sharing
custody of their children, and they had an agreement that
when the children were at Whoever's home for that week,
the other parent on Wednesday night would come over and
to join them for dinner to see the children mid
week and they would sit at the table together and
have dinner. And in this particular case, Jared Bright again
(07:27):
went to see his children. They were staying with his
ex wife and her husband that week, and he went
there for dinner along with him his two year old daughter.
Three year old daughter was with him with his current wife. Yes,
And he gets up to leave to go home. Good dinner,
have a great night, levy kids. It's on his drive
(07:47):
home where he sees a tire in the road, gets
out to move it and gets ambushed, meaning he gets shot.
Police respond to shots fired people calling it into the
neighborhood and they arrive at the scene to find Jared
Bride again shot to death in the middle of the
road and his daughter crying in the back seat of
the truck. That's the scene.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Re Yeah, And I think one of the more poignant
little links in the chain to this is that that
precious little baby in that backseat of that pickup truck.
She actually reported she was able to communicate to the
investigators at that particular time that she heard the sound
(08:32):
of the weapon. The report of the weapon going off.
And look this is and again I want to draw
our attention back to this update and relative to let
me just tell you real quick because I think it's
it's kind of insightful what I found by taking a
look at the autopsy report here, Dave. First off, an
(08:55):
EMMY investigator did in fact attend the scene, and this
individual reported that when the police arrived, they found Jared
in a prone position, face down. Of course, when the
them investigator showed up, you know, we're talking about the
first police officers that arrived. So he's laying, you know,
(09:19):
in a prone position, face down in the roadway. When
the investigator got there, Jared's face up. And there's the
reason for this is that the e mts have been
working on him. And as a matter of fact, the
autopsy report reveals that there were two defibrillator pads and
(09:40):
their adherent It's not like you know the old days
where you think about they're using the paddles where they're
you know, they're holding the shots in their hands. Yeah, exactly,
these are adherent on his body. So they did take
what is commonly referred to as heroic measures. But here's
here's the thing that was really striking. One of the
(10:01):
comments that was made when this thing first came up, apparently,
and this is through the EMMY investigators report, they allude
to this idea that when first observed, they thought this
was a road rage incident. Really yeah, and again, you know,
what are you going to think? What are you going
(10:22):
to think? Because you know who in their wildest fantasies
would think that first off, use term ambush. And I
think that's an excellent idea. And I've talked about this
before actually with our friend Nancy Grace. This is what
you call a choke point because whoever planned this out,
the road kind of narrows up and there's a lot
(10:43):
of vegetation on either side, and it's wet. I mean
we're talking about Florida. We're talking you know, in the
Jacksonville area, and so you don't have any way to
get around an obstruction in the road. And I'm sure
that Jerrie is a nice, nice man and a good citizen.
He got out of the truck to remove not just
(11:04):
it's not just a tire, just so we understand that
it's a tire with a rim. And so if you
run over a rim of a tire, he understood it.
And it doesn't matter how big your truck is, you're
going to do damage to your vehicle. And so he
recognized that got out of truck. So that goes to
this idea of intent. So you know, that's what they
(11:24):
observed at the scene with Jared. The EMMY investigator at
the scene already recognized that he did in fact have
(11:46):
trauma to his left shoulder, and it's later identified that
you know, he sustained they I think they're saying a
witness heard or a witness reported five gunshots. I don't know,
because sometimes you get these you get these comments that
come up relative to and people misremember things, and you know,
(12:11):
we see this happen all the time. He did the
same two gunshot wounds. We just don't know what order
they were in. However, I can tell you this, they
were both on the left side. So whoever shot him,
when he gets out of the vehicle to move this
tire out of the roadway, that's when po pop. You know,
like this, you've got this this these two gsws that
(12:35):
occur on the left aspect, So this individual is approaching
him from that perspective. I think that they were just
hidden off of the road. If I am not mistaken.
This is another part of our update. We have someone
that has pled guilty in this case, I think already,
and this is probably going to be the trigger puller.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Right when we left off, yeah, we had just had
the arrest of Henry Tennon and that's when they said
at the press conference, we know Henry Tennen did not
act alone. They were able to get Henry to talk
negotiating a deal. You've pointed out before a couple of
(13:17):
different times, the first one to get negotiate gets the
best deal, yep. And that's what happened here. And later
Mario Fernandez Saldana and Jared's first wife were both arrested,
and in this particular case, Henry Tennan. Apparently, when they
(13:40):
had enough evidence to go and talk to him, they
went to his house where he was living, and they
found a tire matching the tire that was in the road, Joe,
and not just a little bit, not like, oh yeah
they look similar or whatever, down to the act, which
I didn't know what all the numbers on atire meant.
(14:00):
Oh yeah, yeah, they mean everything about who They actually
can tell you that Joseph Scott Morgan licked his tuna
sandwich right before this was pressed, you know, and they
were able to pinpoint that that tire match up to
the same batch that this tire was from, and it
was just remarkable how they were able to pinpoint it
(14:21):
down to Jerry Bridigan and his truck.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Well, that's what we hope for as far as criminals,
because criminals are never masterminds. Just to understand that. And
so we've been hearing about this for many many months
now that they have CCTV footage of this, and the
footage that was released was kind of blurry. I really
wonder as this investigation has progressed, if they were able
(14:48):
to kind of tighten down those images a little bit
and maybe they had other views of this vehicle. Perhaps
they sent clips that they had to another agency for
them to kind of refine them that they could use
them better to identify this vehicle. What we do know
is a specific make that we're looking for Ford F
one fifty and that is going to lead back, I think,
(15:12):
to a key piece of evidence in this case. And
this goes back to the tire. People keep talking about
the tire that was in the roadway that initially blocked
Jared's progression down the road. And we have to keep
in mind something here, and this is again a major,
major bit of evidence. So the fact that it's not
(15:34):
just a tire. You know, when we examine tires in forensics,
we're not just looking at the tread, you know, the
tread impressions that are left on the surface. It is
that data that you can get off of the wall
of the tire. And it's not just tire size. You
can go back. Obviously there's going to be a manufacturer
stamp on there that is going to brand the tire.
(15:57):
And that's just the starting point. Report.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
You mentioned that the tire wasn't just a rubber tire,
it was actually mounted on a rim left in the road.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Was the tire flat? Yes, the tire's flat. And just
so you understand, that's not mentioned in the autopsy report
or that corner's report. That's something that I had in
the party picked up on. You know, you talked about batching,
you know, when it rolls off the line, and so
if you get two that, you know, what are the
odds And those are circumstantial components from an evidentiary standpoint,
(16:33):
but they all directly point back to something else. And
so when you have this evidence mounting, and as you said,
this individual has rolled I like to say rolled over
on the case. We know that he's going to be
a state's witness and do the you know, the death
penalties on the table here.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I need to ask you a question, Joe, because you've
as a death investigator and dealing with and lawyers and
judges and courtrooms and everything else. You have a lot
of experience at witnessing a lot of different activity of law.
And I was wondering when they got Henry Tinnen. When
investigators are looking at a case and they find somebody,
(17:19):
I know, they always start from the closest and go out.
And they knew in this particular case that Jared Bright
again and his ex wife Shannon did not have a
good relationship. That it was very murky at best in
terms of how they dealt with one another. And as
in many cases, nobody's innocent, everybody's I'm not accusing anyone
(17:39):
of any wrongdoing, just saying that oftentimes it's not always
one sided. Both individuals tend to do things because you
just get pushed. And anyway, when Henry Tinnen was arrested
at First, he wasn't originally arrested for this crime. They
knew based on he was renting a house from uh
(18:01):
Mario Fernandez, married to Jered Bridigan's why ex wife. Yep,
so they knew right away. Wait a minute, we got
this connection. We got Henry Tennon. That he gets charged
with possession of a weapon by a felon and driving
with a suspended or revoked license, and that you know,
the charge is totally unrelated to Jared Bridigan. Right from that,
(18:22):
they get a tip. Now I don't know who the
tip came from, but officers visited Henry's home, Yeah, and
found the tire in that moment.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, and that that occurs in many of these cases. Uh,
this is my own personal you know, vernacular for this,
but I call those placeholder charges because you know that
something bigger is coming coming down a well, yeah, yeah,
it kind of is. And you know, you have to
have the prosecutor on board along with the police in
(18:58):
order to roll the dice. Because look, if if you
make any kind of mistake relative to this and you
charge them with this lesser charge or you bring them
in under the suspicion, suspicion of being involved in something
else you have tread very carefully because and whatever you do,
you need to act swiftly. You don't want them to
(19:18):
languish based on this lesser charge that might put future
charges in jeopardy. So they had this in my mind
looking from the outside, not knowing any inside information as
to what was going on in private conversations, that sort
of thing. But I've been around this long enough to
know that they're contemplating this. And I got to tell you, Dave,
(19:45):
they have affected two more arrest in this case, and
this being the ex wife of Jared as well as
her current hosban. And there is motivation here where you've
got this pre premeditative factor that comes into this. And
(20:09):
here's here's another part to this, uh you talk about,
you know, kind of the layering of charges. There's actually
a child abuse charge that's in here as well, and
that goes along with subjecting this poor baby to these
events that night. And that's that's going to be something
(20:29):
Whennesson goes to trial that we're going to watch because
you know, they're not going to obviously put this baby
on stand, but they have statement that comes that's uttered.
It's an utterance from this child that the police have
recorded and that's going to go into the record, and
you're going to have some police officer, potentially a detective
or maybe even maybe even the initial patrol officer that
(20:54):
showed up, and there's like maybe what what what happened?
And that will be in the written record, and that
again is a very damning element to this. But again,
we're going to keep our eye on this. I think
that the fact that we have the autopsy report and
(21:15):
that we also have these other arrests that have been
affected is a big piece to this. And I can
tell you this, these people are staring straight down the
barrel of capital punishment here because the elements are present,
(21:37):
and we know how to stay to Florida works Dave.
So they're going to have to show up very well prepared.
They're going to have to have great counsel to make
their way through this because this case.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Is chilling to the bone.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
People oftentimes report hearing multiple shots, and in this case,
we heard four to five shots reported and there are
two bullet wounds to Jared Bright. Again, not uncommon to
have people say I heard four shots and there was
only two.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
No, no, there's not And that is not uncommon. However,
I think that if we reflect back, you know, you're
kind of you're kind of dancing back and forth the
universal you not you, you Dave. But you begin to think about,
you know, what was in fact heard. And keep in
(22:42):
mind this is this is a residential area or immediately adjacent.
I know that I talked about how narrow the road is,
but this is going back into a pretty wealthy, you
know area enclave. As people like to say. Whether it
was four or five, it's unknown. However, we do know
(23:04):
that four shell casings were recovered at the scene. I'm
just wondering if these other projectiles were shots that went wild.
And you know, they're not necessarily finishing wounds or finishing shots,
they're just initial you know, maybe it was the nerves
(23:27):
of the person that was actually pulling the trigger. Here,
we don't know, but two two found their way, you know,
into Jared's body. The first one that they're talking about
is a penetrating gunshot wound of the left shoulder and neck.
So right, it's going to be at the base of
the neck where the neck actually joins onto the shoulder,
(23:50):
you know, or the origin.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Of the neck.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
If you want to put it in another term. And
then there was also a and that's a penetrating gunshot wound.
And then we have a perforating gunshot wound of the
left shoulder, the neck, right shoulder, and right up our arms.
So what that means is this perforates all of those
(24:13):
anatomical structures it passes through there. So let me just
say that again the second wound, and this is not
an order, and you know, the pathologists will say, I
might call it one and two, but that doesn't imply
that this is actually the order in which they were fired.
They're just observing these injuries. So you've got two separate
wound tracks here. The first one is a penetrating gunshot
(24:36):
wound of the left shoulder and neck, and there's no
exit wound identified, and they were able to actually recover
the fragment of the projectile core as they refer to it.
The second one is perforating. So the way they have
(24:59):
this wound tracking again is going to be from the
left aspect of Jared's body, okay, and we can be
positioned in any number of.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
Ways.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
So just because it's in the left of the left aspect,
that doesn't mean that it's a static event. Jared could
have been moving around. It's just that the person that
was shooting was to his left, and it's hard to
get an idea of spatial spatial orientation. We do know
that there there's no evidence of like soot deposition or
(25:32):
anything like that. So we're outside probably eighteen to thirty
six inches, so you're not going to have gunpowder landing
on the body that sort of thing. But this, the
second wound, actually tracks through multiple anatomical structures and it
entered initially and the left shoulder neck then passes through
(25:58):
the right shoulder, right up or arm where you have
this this exit and that goes to perforation. That's perforation
versus penetration. Penetration. When we define that, that means that
penetration enters, it doesn't exit. Perforation means that it enters
and then it's going to exit. It doesn't necessarily mean
(26:21):
that you're going to recover the projectile the scene, you know,
because we're talking about a densely wooded area and we
don't have that information. Did they go out there with
the metal detector looking for this looking for this projectile?
I don't know. But in a case like Jared's and
I can because the the emy district in the state,
(26:43):
the state of Florida is broken up into districts, district emmys.
It's not like a city or something like that. They
have it broken into a district. This particular district is
jam Up. I mean, they're they're a really good office
and they would have been very thorough at autopsy. I
can tell you that there would have been X rays
(27:06):
that were performed on Jared's remains before doing the autopsy.
The reason you do that is you want to be
able to track the wound before you go in and
kind of open the body anatomically and do a gross
examination that way. And you're looking for when you have
(27:29):
like a perforating wound where it passes through the body,
that projectile in this case is hitting a lot of
structures Dave. And so what does that mean, Well, they
can lead to fragmentations around and if you can and
we call it a lead storm, which is kind of
interesting to me. I've heard that years years ago. A
lead storm. Yeah, you look at it and you can
(27:50):
see these radio opaque little bodies that are tracking and
you can almost track the wound with those because if
it's shearing off along the way. You'll see these little dots,
metallic dots in the X ray. That's very powerful in
court because many times they don't want you to show
(28:11):
autopsy photographs because they claim that they're prejudicial because they're
so over the top with a lot of blood and
that sort of thing. Not in this case, you can
take an X ray and put it up there. There's
nothing necessarily grotesque about it. You don't have blood and
tissue and all that stuff. What you do have is
these little elements that the bullet is leaving behind as
it's tracking through this guy's body. And it's very powerful.
(28:33):
As matter of fact, more people can appreciate the anatomical
orientation with an X ray than they can, Like, if
you're looking at a body that's open on the table,
you're not used to seeing that. It's shocking to the senses,
and they'll, you know, the physicians will point out, well,
we've got hemorrhage here and here and here and at all.
(28:55):
When you're not used to seeing these things. As a
jury member, it all the same, you know. And it
took me years working in the more before I was
able to disseminate between these two. So if they have
these X rays, trust me, that's going to be presented
in court. The forensic pathologist is going to address that
in court, and they're going to be able to show
(29:15):
these these little elements along the way. So they're they're
really I think in this case, they're prepped as far
as the physical evidence, this connectivity, this big piece that
you revealed about the reveal with the tire and how
you can track that, and what are the odds that
(29:36):
this is gonna you know, I know, And so look,
you know, I've always held and I've always said this
about about perpetrators, it's merely a Hollywood device when you
have some master criminal. Uh. They do exist out there,
but they are rare as hens teeth, as they say
(29:59):
most and thank goodness that that's the case, because most
people do not think these actions through.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
You mentioned Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did perforated.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Bullet going through his skin coming out right.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
In Rambo three, yeah, Sylvester Sloan has the gunshot wound
and it's he's got to gotta make it stop bleeding, right,
and so he takes a little gunpowder and lights it
on fire, and you see the fire go right, through
from the front to the back, you know, and for
screams in pain. But then a minute later he's doing
whatever gymnastics or whatever. But that that wouldn't actually serve
(30:36):
any real purpose, would it. I mean, would that help.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
That context what they're trying to do, what they're trying
to display his quarterization remember that quarter a wound? Yeah,
and pouring gun And that's been done in a number
of movies years. You know, you're trying to quarterize those
in kind of serum so that you, uh, you block
off those little broken vessels along the way. But yeah,
(30:59):
that's been done a number of times in the movies
and demonstrated. I don't know that it's ever been done
in reality, but I can tell you with the injuries
that Jared sustained, these were obviously catastrophic. The viscera that
this would have passed through and what I mean like
(31:20):
the organs and also the adjacent areas. When you begin
to think about all the vessels that passed through this area,
it's it's so bloody cast catastrophic in this in this
context that even if you had a team of surgeons there, Dave,
(31:46):
it would be really hard to tie all these off
so that he could have survived these injuries. But I
do know this, Jared, though he is not with us,
will soon have his day in court. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is body bags
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Mhm