JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (Court TV) — The attorney for a woman accused of hiring a hit man to kill her ex-husband accused the lead detective of lying under oath during a hearing and has asked a judge to release his client.
Shanna Gardner takes an oath in court in Dec. 2023, as she waives her right to a speedy trial. (Court TV)
Shanna Gardner faces a potential death sentence if she’s convicted for Jared Bridegan’s murder. Gardner, along with her second husband, Mario Fernandez Saldana, is accused of hiring Henry Tenon to shoot and kill the Microsoft executive. Bridegan was gunned down on Feb. 16, 2022, shortly after dropping off the children he shared with Gardner.
On Friday, Gardner’s attorney, Jose Baez, accused the prosecution and the case’s lead detective of lying during a previous hearing and asked for his client to be released, or at least given a new bond hearing.
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At a bond hearing in May, Detective Christopher Johns testified for the prosecution about text messages found during the investigation into Bridegan’s murder that he said showed Gardner reaching out to friends, including Kimberly Jensen, to find a hitman. Prosecutors alleged that phrases like “funeral potatoes” were actually coded requests for a hitman.
At Friday’s hearing, Jensen was called to the stand to explain the text messages, which she acknowledged referenced Bridegan as “Stupid.” Jensen said that the discussions of “hitmen” in their messages were a long-running inside joke, and insisted that funeral potatoes were simply a side dish — a fact she said she told Johns during an interview before Gardner’s arrest.
“The prosecutors were under the impression that was a code word for planning a murder, which is patently false,” Jensen said. “Funeral potatoes is just like, a little catchphrase in the church. It’s a staple food after a funeral, the people get served a meal and typically it was that. … I was part of the team that would provide food for families who had lost loved ones, and I think I got asked to make funeral potatoes four times in such a small amount of time and that was, like, a common thing at the time.”
Baez pointed to the discrepancy in characterizations of the conversation as well as questions of which witnesses were interviewed, as evidence of Johns lying on the stand. “Not just lying once, but time and time again on major critical facts and withholding information, misleading information and flat-out false information,” Baez told the judge. “This has no place in a court of law.”
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Friday’s hearing became contentious after Baez accused the prosecution of not handing over two months of bank records as part of discovery. Prosecutor Alan Mizrahi showed his frustration when he told the judge, “I find it very difficult to be lectured on how to be a prosecutor and how to take the solemn responsibility that the people of the state of Florida have entrusted to me and to be lectured by someone that stands on the steps of the courthouse and gives press conferences in violation of professional rules of conduct and then comes into this court and raises issues that he’s never raised before in paper motions, which is the way things are done, which is the way we’re taught in law school.”
Mizrahi noted “a phone call and email” would have sufficed for the missing records, rather than a presentation in court.
Judge Kite said she would take the issue under consideration. The parties are due back in court on Sept. 23 for another hearing.
