On the night of February 16, 2022, 33-year-old Microsoft employee Jared Bridegan was driving home with his 2-year-old daughter Bexley in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, when he noticed a tire in the middle of the road. He got out to take a look and was ambushed by a gunman, shot multiple times outside the car and killed.
Bexley was found unharmed, buckled in her car seat, by passersby who called 911. When police arrived, they took her to a nearby station. Officers say while they tried their best to comfort her, they lacked basic necessities for toddlers, such as comfort toys, sippy cups, and correctly sized diapers.
Bexley’s experience inspired her mother, Kirsten, Jared Bridegan’s widow, to help ease difficult moments for children in police stations. In September 2022, Kirsten Bridegan created Bexley Box, an initiative that delivers comfort kits to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
This summer, Jared’s ex-wife, Shanna Gardner, and her second husband, Mario Fernandez Saldana, will stand trial separately for orchestrating Jared’s murder by hiring a hit man. They have pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, solicitation to commit a capital felony, and child abuse.
On today’s episode of Dateline: True Crime Weekly, Andrea Canning talks to Kirsten Bridegan about the Bexley Box and her family’s journey to turn grief into purpose.
You can listen to the full episode now, for free.
Plus, read a transcript of their exchange below:
Andrea Canning: Welcome to the podcast, Kirsten. Thank you for being here.
Kirsten Bridegan: Thank you for having me.
Andrea Canning: First off, I just want to say all of our hearts go out to you and your family. How are you doing?
Kirsten Bridegan: I’m doing OK. I think it helps that the trials are coming up finally. We’ve been waiting for almost four and a half years, and it’s finally here.
Andrea Canning: Yeah, it’s like you say you never get closure, but you can certainly have closure on, you know, the legal portion of it, which is very difficult.
Kirsten Bridegan: Right.
Andrea Canning: I’m so sorry for all of you. And I also commend you because out of this grief, you have created something good for other children. First off, take us back to the day when you walked into that police station to get Bexley, and she’s there all by herself with law enforcement, and –. That must have just been excruciating as a mother.
Kirsten Bridegan: It was. You know, it was at night. We walk in, and she’s in essentially the break room. She’s sitting at a table. She’s got one little squishy toy. I believe it was like a stress-ball type of a toy, and then a few crayons and a coloring book. And she’s two and a half. She’s little. And just to sit there without more to comfort her was heartbreaking. She also needed a diaper change, and I didn’t have a diaper bag. So there’s just several things that sat with me for months after that experience that I wish had been different for her.
Andrea Canning: And you had been looking for Jared, right? Like, until that point, you didn’t know what had happened.
Kirsten Bridegan: I had been calling him repeatedly, and there was no answer until finally a different voice answered his phone, and it was a police officer. They wouldn’t tell me anything except to come to the police station. And so I walked in there, and I had no knowledge of what had happened up until that point.
Andrea Canning: Wow. I can’t even imagine you that evening having to go through all of that. Has Bexley ever talked to you? Obviously, she’s two and a half, so she couldn’t have said much at the time, but has she ever talked to you about that night? Does she remember anything?
Kirsten Bridegan: We haven’t spoken in detail about it for probably a couple of years. But when she was younger, she would repeat mostly about sounds that she heard that night, and “Daddy on the ground” was another phrase that she would repeat. Mostly now, we talk about who her dad was, the memories that we have. We look at pictures and videos, you know. His photo is all over our home.
Andrea Canning: And she’s six now, turning seven this year?
Kirsten Bridegan: She’ll be seven in the summer. She’s excited.
Andrea Canning: So let’s talk about your initiative. After that terrible day, you launched a foundation, and you created something called the Bexley Box. So tell us about how this came about, what this box is, what it entails.
Kirsten Bridegan: So as I reflected on that night, wishing that there had been more to comfort her, that she had a diaper that fit her, I just thought, we have to do something, something that’ll make this better for other kids that might, you know, hopefully not be in the same situation, but similar situation, where they need to be comforted while at a police station. And so I shared this idea on social media. I said, “You know what? I want to get a cute toy box, and I want to fill it with things and just donate it to them so that this doesn’t happen again.” And once I shared that, it kind of just caught fire, and a whole bunch of moms, some dads too, were like, “Oh, you should put this in there,” and “What about this?” And so I gathered some of that feedback and very carefully selected the items to go into the first Bexley Box, and delivered it to the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, where this happened. And then from there, the fire not only behind myself, but behind the community and mothers across the world really, was so contagious and so large that we knew, “Hey, we’ve got to — we have to start a foundation, because I can’t keep having people send me Amazon and Target boxes to my house.” Like, that’s just not gonna be a long-term solution. So we founded the Bridegan Foundation, and through there we have done almost 70 Bexley Boxes across the country to this date, and within the next month we will do an additional two hundred forty-five.
Andrea Canning: Oh, my gosh. That’s amazing. Do you have departments reaching out to you now saying, “Hey, we’d like one of those”?
Kirsten Bridegan: We do. We have departments reaching out. Mostly, it’s women actually on the staff at police departments that are saying, “We want one.” Victim advocates that work at police departments or sheriff’s offices. And then we also have people in the community that said, “I want one for my police station.” So we’ve had several sponsored by families and communities across the country that want to make sure that their police station has a Bexley Box ready to go. We have just partnered with Walmart for the entire state of Florida. So they had originally committed to doing about a hundred thousand dollars in funds and in-kind donations, and they have since doubled that. And they are the reason we are going to be doing two hundred and forty-five agencies in the state of Florida by the end of June.
Andrea Canning: Congratulations. And how has this affected Bexley? I‘m sure she’s a part of this, right?
Kirsten Bridegan: Yeah, she is. She was at the press conference where we announced the partnership, and she was excited. What she really enjoys, though, is helping to pick out the items for the box, and some of the things that we put in there are based off of one of her favorites from when she was little.
Andrea Canning: Is that a Jellycat?
Kirsten Bridegan: No, it’s just a little security blanket. She calls it her “lovey.” So there’s several of those in each box. She gets excited, and I think she likes that something’s named after her. I mean, what kid wouldn’t enjoy that? And she knows why we did it, and that’s meaningful to her.
Andrea Canning: I mean, it has to be a part of her therapy, right, in a way? Doesn’t that all kind of go hand-in-hand?
Kirsten Bridegan: It does. I think it’s therapy for our whole family, just knowing we can take the darkest part of our lives and turn it into something bright and hopeful for other people.
Andrea Canning: You’ve already come so far, Kirsten. What is, sort of, the goal for the future with your endeavor that is exploding at this point?
Kirsten Bridegan: My biggest hope is that a Bexley Box will eventually be available in every law enforcement agency in the country. And I want a Bexley Box to become a standard resource, kind of like an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) or a first aid kit, something that departments know that they can count on long term, that will be refilled and kept updated for them so that they can serve the children in our communities the best that they can.
Andrea Canning: I just love this. I mean, as much as I am so sad for you and everything that’s happened, this makes me really happy. Thank you, Kirsten, for joining us today.
Kirsten Bridegan: Thank you, Andrea.
