JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (Court TV) — A man convicted of plotting and funding the murder-for-hire of his wife’s ex-husband is asking for a new trial, claiming that prosecutors made improper arguments to the jury and altered a key piece of evidence in the case.
Mario Fernandez Saldana appears in court on Aug. 25, 2026. (Court TV)
Mario Fernandez Saldana, 38, was found guilty on charges of first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony in the death of Microsoft executive Jared Bridegan. Bridegan, who was previously married to Fernandez’s wife, Shanna Gardner, was shot and killed after dropping off the two children he shared with his ex.
Prosecutors convinced the jury that Fernandez hired a tenant on his rental property, Henry Tenon, to murder Bridegan. Fernandez’s defense had maintained at trial that all the government’s evidence was circumstantial, requiring jurors to draw unsupported inferences. “Therefore, the State repeatedly confronted an unavoidable pattern: critical facts necessary to prove its theory were not established by admitted evidence,” Fernandez’s appellate attorney, Shannon Day, wrote in the motion for a new trial. “Rather than permit those evidentiary gaps to remain where the evidence left them, the State repeatedly filled them in during closing argument.”
In their closing argument, prosecutors said that missing location data from Fernandez’s phone on the night of Bridegan’s death was the result of the defendant turning off his phone; they also suggested that missing text messages between Fernandez and Tenon had been deleted. But the motion for a new trial points out that text messages between Fernandez and Tenon were recovered — prosecutors weren’t allowed to use them as a result of a sanction handed down in 2024 after Judge London Kite found that the district attorney’s office had violated attorney-client privilege by improperly accessing documents on Fernandez’s electronic devices.
Then, during the prosecution’s rebuttal closing arguments, Fernandez’s attorneys said prosecutors went a step further by physically altering the evidence.
“During rebuttal closing argument, the prosecutor displayed a digitally altered reproduction of Mr. Fernandez’s check to Mr. Tenon,” the motion said. “Although the actual check admitted into evidence contained the handwritten memo notation ‘kick starter good luck!!,’ the State’s demonstrative replaced that notation with ‘Killing Jared Bridegan.’ The altered image therefore did not merely highlight or annotate admitted evidence; it changed the content of the underlying document to depict the very incriminating purpose the State was required to prove.”
The motion acknowledges that prosecutors had the right to argue the jury should disbelieve the “kick starter” memo line. “It was not free, however, to use an altered reproduction of the check to visually supply that criminal purpose and then invoke money laundering to explain why the actual evidence did not contain it.”
Fernandez faces life in prison when he is sentenced on Oct. 5. Gardner’s jury trial on the same charges was expected to start earlier this month, but was delayed after prosecutors filed two new charges of lewd and lascivious molestation against Fernandez.
