The Murder of Jared Bridegan: Part Three: The Man in the Woods

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[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_03] I'm Anya, and this is part of our deep dive into a murder conspiracy case full of twists, turns, and upcoming trials. This series will take you inside the murder of Jared Brightigan and make you an expert on the case before we get to trial.

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_01] Content warning. This episode contains discussion of murder and violence.

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_03] A note before we begin. Starting this summer, multiple defendants are slated to face charges in the murder of Jared Brightigan. We'll be doing this deep dive into the case and then jumping right into some in-depth trial coverage. In today's episode, we'll be picking up where we left off in the case. So go back and listen to our previous two episodes if you haven't already.

[00:04:02] [SPEAKER_01] In our last episode, we took you through the whole crime scene in the murder of Jared Brightigan. That darkened intersection of Sanctuary Boulevard in Jacksonville Drive in Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

[00:04:17] [SPEAKER_03] But today, we'll be covering a new day in the case. We'll check in with the officers and detectives as they continue their investigation into Jared's murder. We'll meet some potential suspects, too, including a mysterious man in the woods. Remember, though, it's still early days. Investigators have a long and winding path to go. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist.

[00:04:40] [SPEAKER_01] And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney. And this is The Murder Sheet. We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet.

[00:04:52] [SPEAKER_03] And this is The Murder of Jared Brightigan, Part 3, The Man in the Woods.

[00:04:57] [SPEAKER_03] The morning after the murder, on Thursday, February 17, 2022, at 9.15 a.m., lead detective Christopher Lee Johns of the Jacksonville Beach Police Department headed to the medical examiner's office.

[00:05:56] [SPEAKER_03] That is an imposing white building with a pyramid of metal scaffolding atop it.

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_01] Inside, Detective Johns learned more about how Jared had died. The medical examiner conducting the autopsy concluded that Jared had been shot twice in his left shoulder. One bullet remained in the lower portion of his neck. That was collected. The second bullet was not present in his body, having exited his left shoulder.

[00:06:23] [SPEAKER_03] Attending an autopsy and discussing the murder with a medical examiner, now that's the part of the detective work everyone talks about that gets shown in every police procedural ever.

[00:06:33] [SPEAKER_01] But Detective Johns also got to work on another crucial aspect of police work that rarely gets talked about. Paperwork. Namely, an effort to get a subpoena for the Windies where Jared had treated his kids to Frosties the night before. He wanted banking records for Jared from JPMorgan Chase.

[00:06:52] [SPEAKER_03] And he had preservation letters to send out, too. Those are missives to companies asking them to preserve certain records that might be relevant to a case. Those were sent to T-Mobile for Jared's ex-wife Shanna Gardner and her new husband, Mario Fernandez-Saldana. Detective Johns wanted to know what their phone records showed.

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_01] At the Jacksonville Beach Station, Detective Stephen Currier met with another law enforcement partner, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives bureau agent Mark Mutts. He arrived offering help. Remember those shell casings left of the murder scene? Well, the ATF could test each of the casings for DNA and then submit them to their National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN.

[00:07:39] [SPEAKER_01] NIBIN is a database that compares spent cartridge cases from crime scenes and test-fired guns. Think like a fingerprint or a DNA database, but for cartridge cases.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_03] Detective Currier checked that evidence out of the property room for the ATF. A quick analysis showed that they were all 10-millimeter shells. Two of the casings were from the brand Underwood. The other two were from the brand PPU.

[00:08:04] [SPEAKER_01] That same morning, it came time to deal with another repository of potential forensic evidence. Jared's SUV, the 2018 Black Volkswagen Atlas. The previous night, Officer Shane Jarman, Jared Langlaw, Aaron Filbert, and James Choate had formed the evidence technician team. Officer Jarman was an evidence technician for the department, and Officer Choate was the property officer.

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_03] The four of them gathered in the Jacksonville Beach Police Department's property garage. Officer Jarman took pictures of the crime scene tape sealing the SUV's doors. Then, they all ripped those open. The SUV could hold crucial evidence. They would need to find out.

[00:08:44] [SPEAKER_01] The team worked from the outside in. They photographed the entire car. Then, they dusted it. Officer Langlaw collected possible latent prints from the rear left and driver's side doors, as well as the rear left driver's side quarter panel in the right rear window. At some point, they emptied the car of all items, setting them down on an unused tarp on the floor. Some of those objects included air pods and a bunch of keys.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_03] Leaning inside, Officer Jarman struggled to open the glove box. Felt jammed. Yanking it as hard as he could, it finally came open. Something plinked out onto the passenger side floorboard. Another bullet. The glove box hadn't been locked. Just jammed from the damage incurred by the bullet. The front passenger door also had a hole in it.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_01] Officer Jarman marked the bloodstains and two bullet holes on the front seat and photographed them with scales. The team also set up the OSCR 360 in the vehicle and let it do its thing in the rear passenger area and the front. Like they had previously done, Officers Chilton and Filbert broke out dowels and strings for a shooting reconstruction. Officer Jarman snapped pictures to measure the angles and trajectories of the bullets.

[00:09:58] [SPEAKER_03] But some of the evidence was still unaccounted for. They needed to find another bullet. And from the shooting reconstruction, they had a feeling they'd find it in the front passenger door. The evidence team removed the plastic beneath the vehicle's entertainment system so they could better track the path of the missing bullet. They found plenty of damage behind the plastic. That indicated the bullet had gone into the passenger door.

[00:10:23] [SPEAKER_01] But getting that would be easier said than done. After they stripped off that door's plastic covering, they found it was solid, with a hollow section in the middle to allow for the glass window to move up and down. The team removed the glass entirely. The evidence technicians peered into the hollow. But the gap was too small to really get a good view. It was barely wide enough to fit a hand or an arm inside.

[00:10:49] [SPEAKER_03] They tried, but none of them could really get in there. They removed the plastic liner from beneath the door, but there was no drainage hole. The door was totally solid along the bottom. The team pulled out the speaker at the bottom of the door, thinking that might help. But that was enclosed in its own little compartment with no connection to the door's central hollow. Officer Jarman knew they could hardly just leave the bullet inside, though.

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_01] So the officers broke out the power tools. A metal saw. A hammer claw. A crowbar. Officer Jarman started small. He tried to cut a small section of the door and then remove the glass. But he found that his arm and hand got stuck against a metal bar when he reached down.

[00:11:30] [SPEAKER_03] So instead, he had to cut along the bottom of the outside of the door. The team shook the door back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Anything to get the bullet loose. Finally, the missing bullet emerged. It popped up from the section beneath the bar. They got it.

[00:11:53] [SPEAKER_01] The SUV told a grim story. A nighttime ambush. Blood stains on the driver's seat. Downward drips. And a swipe sort of transfer stain like someone was bleeding while exiting the vehicle. Like Jared had been shot before he even fully got out.

[00:12:11] [SPEAKER_03] Officer Jarman and his colleagues placed all the other items they had removed from the vehicle back inside. Then, the team split up to take care of a few important evidentiary tasks.

[00:12:21] [SPEAKER_01] Officer Choate processed the tire left in the road. He swabbed it in four locations and logged those. Then, he covered it in black powder, searching for latent prints. There were no prints. A few days later, Officer Jarman swabbed the tire for DNA. In response to a request from Sergeant Keith Shackelford, Officer Jarman also documented the make, model, and all the relevant numbers stamped on the tire.

[00:12:49] [SPEAKER_03] The tire was a BF Goodrich Advantage TA Sport LT, size 265, 60R18. And Officer Jarman also took a whole bunch of pictures of the thing. Meanwhile, things were humming along as far as looking into Jared's phone with his widow Kirsten's permission. On February 22, 2022, Detective Alan Ford picked up Jared's iPhone from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office's Computer Forensic Investigations Unit. Officer Philbert went back to Sanctuary Boulevard.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_03] Officers had located a bush beer can in the grass along the tree line on the west side of the roadway, not far away from where Jared's body had lay. They also found white socks with red and blue stitching. There was something odd about the area around those socks, too. It was totally cleared of debris, and the grass almost looked flattened like something had been resting there. Officer Philbert used three touch DNA swabs on the can.

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_03] She collected that and the socks and submitted it all into evidence.

[00:13:52] [SPEAKER_01] There were some investigative measures that were not taken. At 8.29 p.m. the night before, Sergeant Lawrence Smith had called Officer Benjamin Gray. Sergeant Smith wanted to know if he could bring by police service dog Bear to track. Bear is a very adorable German Shepherd police dog who worked with Officer Gray for eight years. The canine's time on the force just recently came to an end when he retired this April.

[00:14:18] [SPEAKER_03] But the problem was Bear wouldn't have a lot to go on. There was minimal information about the shooter or the path the suspect might have gone. Bear would not really have helped in Officer Gray's view. Plus, the whole area around the SUV had been contaminated with extensive foot traffic. That wasn't anyone's fault, really. It was just the reality. Enough time had passed where Bear wouldn't have gotten much reliable information, at least in Officer Gray's view.

[00:14:45] [SPEAKER_03] So after that discussion with Sergeant Smith, Officer Gray and Bear did not go out on the call.

[00:14:50] [SPEAKER_01] We have seen people following true crime cases act like dogs or the end-all be-all and get upset when officers make the decision to not utilize dogs in other cases. See the Delphi case. But there are certainly times when a dog's abilities were not necessarily overcome problems at the scene. And that is what the officers seem to think here.

[00:15:10] [SPEAKER_03] But a different dog did come into the case. On February 18, 2022, Sergeant Shackelford met with the United States Customs and Border Protection Canine Officer Darren Witt and his canine Buddy. They did a weapon search near the scene. They went all around, even 10 feet into the tree line.

[00:15:29] [SPEAKER_01] Over those initial few days, Jared's widow, Kirsten, the mother of two of his young daughters, including the two-year-old in the SUV at the time of his shooting, did whatever she could to help the investigation. She readily gave Detective Jason Lamont consent to search Jared's phone, Apple Watch, and vehicle. She also disclosed that she believed Jared owned a handgun. She wasn't exactly sure where it was.

[00:15:55] [SPEAKER_01] A few days later, on February 19, she would find Detective Sergeant David Young and Detective Lamont chucked up on her visiting the home she once shared with Jared to keep her apprised of the investigation. She shared a few interesting things. She had texted Gardner at 1 in the morning right after the murder, presumably during or right after Gardner's visit from Detective Lamont and Detective Brett Burrell.

[00:16:20] [SPEAKER_03] She asked if she could be there when Gardner told the twins of their father's death. Gardner had agreed, and they met that morning to inform the twins. Kirsten also told investigators her little girl had talked a bit more about the murder. She said a guy drove fast and dad stopped the car. Anne continued to talk about the G in the road.

[00:16:43] [SPEAKER_01] To get answers for Kirsten and Jared's family, detectives would need more evidence. And in 2022, they had a lot of options at their disposal, even aside from the forensic firearms and physical evidence. By 2022, personalized surveillance camera setups were commonplace on people's residences. Think home security brands like Ring, SimpliSafe, Nest. Jared had been ambushed in a residential neighborhood.

[00:17:13] [SPEAKER_01] The surveillance cameras at the homes nearby might have captured something important.

[00:17:18] [SPEAKER_03] To get help with the surveillance camera situation, Corporal Yvonne Santiago got in touch with Carrie Pallotto, an account manager with the Ring Neighbors program. The police wanted help gathering more footage. They also relied on the residents themselves.

[00:17:33] [SPEAKER_01] Detectives canvassed the neighborhood around the intersection at Sanctuary Boulevard and Jacksonville Drive. They would spend the day knocking on doors, listening to residents' stories, asking for surveillance footage. The canvas team included Special Investigation Unit Corporal Brian Wallace, Detective Sergeant David Young, Detective Brett Burrell, and Detective Benjamin Connor.

[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_03] Their canvas would cover Jared's entire journey from Marsh Inlet, taking them south on 15th Street to Fairway Lane, east on Seabreeze Avenue to south on America Avenue, west on Jacksonville Drive to south on Sanctuary Boulevard.

[00:18:11] [SPEAKER_01] To kick things off, on February 17th, 2022, Detectives Burrell and Connor went to obtain video from the sanctuary of Jacksonville Beach's unmanned guard gate. It's August, which means summer is cooling off and we are heading for fall. August is pretty much the Sunday of summer, right? As the seasons change, we'll be relying on our wonderful sponsor, Quince, to keep us feeling stylish and comfortable.

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[00:21:10] [SPEAKER_01] The sanctuary is a gated community in that area. That unmanned guard gate was only a quarter of a mile due west of where Jared was shot and killed. Detectives Burrell and Connor headed over.

[00:21:23] [SPEAKER_03] A disembodied voice spoke to them there, a guard, monitoring the neighborhood remotely. They didn't get the person's name, but the guard couldn't help them with the footage. Instead, the guard gave them their supervisor's phone. They called that number. The supervisor told them to email a specific request to Enverus Systems, such as the nature of a canvas, getting told to talk to someone else again and again all day. Back at the station,

[00:21:50] [SPEAKER_03] administrative assistant Miranda Minton would send in that request.

[00:21:53] [SPEAKER_01] At noon, the two detectives drove to Gardner's house on Marsh Inlet. She talked through that final pickup, with Jared getting the twins for the daddy date night. She shared her home surveillance camera recordings. She seemed cooperative.

[00:22:09] [SPEAKER_03] Detectives Burrell and Connor then started knocking on the doors of Gardner's neighbors. That was when Corporal Wallace got in touch. He told them to meet him at the 4,000 block of America Avenue. It was really important. The two detectives got in the car and drove there. Corporal Wallace had something big. A homeowner had shown him surveillance footage.

[00:22:29] [SPEAKER_01] The detectives looked closer. It appeared to show a person they felt must be the suspected shooter, walking south. That was big. They would need to get more of that footage to piece together the killer's movements.

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_03] Now, such a big win was pretty rare. Most of the individuals the police encountered really couldn't help them.

[00:22:49] [SPEAKER_01] One man had been in Atlanta at the time. Still others were out of town when the canvas was happening.

[00:22:56] [SPEAKER_03] Detectives ran into confused Airbnb house guests and friends staying over in this resort community. Visitors who didn't know how to even access the surveillance footage. Many of them promised to convey the police's request for footage to the homeowners. One babysitter said they would pass on the detective's information. Once, a child even answered the door and said they would ask their mother to get in touch with the police.

[00:23:19] [SPEAKER_01] A bunch of people were not home or didn't even come to the door. Detectives and officers would have to circle back with them later. They left cards on those doors. They got a hold of the absent residents' phone numbers and left voicemails.

[00:23:32] [SPEAKER_03] Many residents did answer but had simply not heard anything. Didn't see anything. Didn't have surveillance cameras. Or working ones at least. Or ones that had actually picked up anything that night. Remember that the next time some true crime sleuth questions why no one heard anything. Sometimes, circumstances conspired to just make that happen.

[00:23:52] [SPEAKER_01] Some residents had heard the shots. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. They weren't quite sure. But they saw nothing. They'd been sitting in their homes in the garages on their back patios at the time. It was not their fault, but those ear witnesses were not super helpful to the investigation. Jared had been shot. That much was clear. Investigators already knew that. They needed to find out who did it.

[00:24:18] [SPEAKER_03] The residents certainly tried to be helpful, though.

[00:24:22] [SPEAKER_01] In fact, on February 19, 2022, Corporal Wallace interviewed a bunch of people living nearby. He even searched the backyard of one of them with their consent. Detectives found nothing, though.

[00:24:34] [SPEAKER_03] Police needed some people who either witnessed the incident, saw potential suspects, or had cameras that actually captured something relevant.

[00:24:44] [SPEAKER_01] Some residents gave detectives the phone numbers of neighbors or friends who might have footage or who might have seen something. One resident advised detectives that her husband was a city employee.

[00:24:55] [SPEAKER_03] A few had thoughts, theories of their own. One man talked about how that day, he noticed traffic near his home had been two to three times busier than usual. Was that related to the murder? Probably not. But he figured he'd point that out.

[00:25:09] [SPEAKER_01] Another resident mentioned a transient named Gabriel Harriet. He lived in the woods. He was around almost every day. He had a loose grip on reality. Could a mentally ill homeless man have gotten a hold of a gun and snapped?

[00:25:24] [SPEAKER_03] Other residents were kind of weird themselves, or maybe just private, or perhaps suspicious of cops. A guy who would only identify himself as Greg opened the door but, quote, refused to give any additional information, end quote.

[00:25:38] [SPEAKER_01] The canvas dragged on for days for those detectives. February 18th, February 19th, and beyond. They went house to house, up and down the boulevards and ways.

[00:25:50] [SPEAKER_03] Now, a few residents were able to quickly get footage to the detectives, emailing over video attachments. One resident even copied his video to a USB drive. Detectives could clearly hear the gunshots in those. No yelling. No crash. No screams. No tires squealing.

[00:26:08] [SPEAKER_01] Detectives didn't stick to just residents, either. Corporal Santiago went to the Jiffy Lube on 3rd Street. They had surveillance footage, but it wasn't any good. Poor quality was a terrible vantage point.

[00:26:22] [SPEAKER_03] Then she went to the clean getaway car wash. Their footage for 16th Avenue and 3rd Street was great, as clear as a freshly soaped and rinsed windshield. But the owner was not in, and that person was the only one able to make a copy. Corporal Santiago viewed the footage, and the employees ensured her it'd be safe for a few weeks, and the owner would get back and send it to her.

[00:26:44] [SPEAKER_01] Corporal Wallace chucked with the Discovery School nearby, the very school where Jared's twins attended. But the operations administrator there told him that the relevant camera or cameras had not been working for two whole weeks. They had nothing.

[00:27:00] [SPEAKER_03] Sometimes footage was important enough to stop everything and look.

[00:27:04] [SPEAKER_01] For instance, on February 19th, 2022, Detectives Burrell and Connor went to the home of a woman who had footage. They watched a parade of vehicles passing by the camera, southbound. A white truck. Then a dark-colored truck. Then at 7.50 p.m., possibly a dark SUV. They called over Detective Sergeant Young and Detective Johns. The detectives watched the video together. It seemed possibly important. They got a copy and left.

[00:27:33] [SPEAKER_03] Corporal Wallace also got a hold of a man whose cameras caught a minute-long clip of the shooting itself. Gunshots and muzzle flashes and everything. Timestamped at 7.52 p.m., right after the flash and the shot, the corporal could see the suspect move right in front of Jared's SUV. The headlights backlit him or her. Then the person rushed away until 7.53 p.m., hurrying off southbound down Sanctuary Boulevard.

[00:28:03] [SPEAKER_03] That was huge. Corporal Wallace made sure to get a bunch of clips from that footage.

[00:28:08] [SPEAKER_01] On February 22, 2022, at 9.55 a.m., Officer Jarman went to Sanctuary Way south to review video. After he watched it, he called Corporal Wallace. Detective Burrell and Corporal Wallace met Officer Jarman and the resident with the footage. The video showed a truck going westbound on Jacksonville Drive near the entrance of Sanctuary Way. It turned on Sanctuary Way south. It was a catch, though. It was unclear if that truck was really all that significant.

[00:28:38] [SPEAKER_01] The resident said the truck might belong to a neighbor.

[00:28:41] [SPEAKER_03] To check it out, Corporal Wallace and Detective Burrell went to Sanctuary Way south. They couldn't get a hold of the truck-driving neighbor who was supposed to live there. They didn't see the truck in the driveway of the home where the man was supposed to live, either. They did check in with the man living across the street, though. He also had footage. That footage showed that the truck had been parked at his neighbor's house the night of the murder. It had actually been parked there for several hours prior to, during, and then after the incident involving Jared.

[00:29:11] [SPEAKER_03] It hadn't moved. So the truck on the footage didn't belong to that particular guy in the neighborhood. Detectives collected all the relevant footage.

[00:29:19] [SPEAKER_01] Some helpful residents did not need to wait for the canvas. They came to the detectives. Sometimes they showed up in person, or they called. Investigators would check their phones and find all sorts of missed calls. Sometimes people left them voicemails just to let them know they had no helpful or relevant information to give.

[00:29:39] [SPEAKER_03] One day, when Detective Lamont got back to the station, a resident was in the lobby waiting for him. He lived near the crime scene. He had video surveillance footage where the gunshots were clearly audible. He left a copy. It took a bit of wrangling after that, but eventually detectives got that video.

[00:29:56] [SPEAKER_01] Another time, Detective Currier was in the station when another resident came in. He had seen media asking for surveillance camera footage from Mering, Nest, or other systems. That resident came prepared. He handed over a thumb drive with footage from his exterior cameras. That captured Jared's SUV driving past. Sadly, the nighttime footage was not super clear.

[00:30:20] [SPEAKER_03] Another woman sent in her video from the Google security system. One more sent to something from Two Twice Security. And that showed a light-colored pickup truck, a dark-colored pickup truck, a vehicle backing out of a driveway, and then a sports utility vehicle.

[00:30:36] [SPEAKER_01] Again, you're seeing the same pattern of vehicles. Light truck, dark truck, possibly Jared's SUV.

[00:30:43] [SPEAKER_03] On February 20, 2022, Detective Ford met with a woman on America Avenue. He got her video footage. It captured four vehicles going southbound on America Avenue. That same day, Officer Jarman responded to Palm Way to get more video. He met a couple living there. They watched the video from their home, which captured four gunshots. Still other possible witnesses shared sightings of individuals they found interesting with the police.

[00:31:11] [SPEAKER_01] On February 18, 2022, Detective Ford talked to someone who left the target on Marsh Landing Parkway on the night of the murder. She noticed a white man and woman jogging on South Beach Parkway. Nothing particularly suspicious, but she figured she'd let the detective know.

[00:31:28] [SPEAKER_03] A local painter returning to a job site got in touch with Corporal Wallace and Detective Burrell. The night of the murder, near Republic Drive, he had seen somebody who caught his attention. A young black man, possibly 25, 30, wearing a white shirt and khaki pants with a single stripe of a backpack strap across his chest. He was riding a speed bicycle.

[00:31:51] [SPEAKER_01] The painter thought the guy was suspicious since he had never seen the man around before.

[00:31:56] [SPEAKER_03] Again, that's not necessarily a huge deal, but I imagine after a murder, a lot of people just start reporting anything that might be helpful. And for that painter, that same night had also produced yet another suspicious character, at least as far as he was concerned.

[00:32:11] [SPEAKER_01] This second possible suspect was a white man, 25 or 30, with long brown hair. The painter called him Scruffy Jesus. He was possibly a homeless person.

[00:32:22] [SPEAKER_03] One woman said she had been walking her dogs recently when a red pickup truck driven by a white man almost hit her. The driver said rude and vulgar things to her before leaving. His plates might have started with JAX or J4X.

[00:32:38] [SPEAKER_01] Another woman had been out walking her dog when she saw a dark gray SUV parked near the intersection with New York license plates. She noticed two older white males, the driver with scruffy facial hair. That was at the intersection. She referenced another lady who she said saw them too, a photographer for a construction company active in the area.

[00:33:00] [SPEAKER_03] On Marsh Inlet, a man in Gardner's neighborhood divulged to police that he suspected Jared's ex's new husband of being involved in some prior incident. It's really unclear from the document what exactly he is referring to.

[00:33:14] [SPEAKER_01] Another possible person of interest emerged, one wholly unconnected to Jared. Remember that man we mentioned earlier, Gabriel Harriet, the long-term transient with a history of serious mental illness? He was known to frequent the area. He lived in the woods. Locals knew him well because he wandered all over the place and was usually not lucid.

[00:33:35] [SPEAKER_03] And most notably, some thought they had seen Harriet in the area the day Jared died. Could this mentally ill man have gotten his hands on a weapon and gunned down an innocent at random? The detectives took everything down. They had no idea what would pan out and what wouldn't.

[00:33:54] [SPEAKER_01] But the sole focus was not on finding new witnesses. Other existing witnesses also needed checking up on. Corporal Santiago called the CPS team to set up an interview with Jared's young daughter. Luis Ramirez and Lori Armstrong called her back. They needed to get a time set up. That would be important. Perhaps the two-year-old had seen something that could give detectives a clue as to who had murdered her father.

[00:34:20] [SPEAKER_03] That Child Protective Services interview took place on February 18, 2022, at 1030 a.m. Detective Lamont and Detective Johns were there. The little girl gave few details. She did not hear any sort of argument. She did see someone who may have had a green hat, pink or red skin, and an outfit suitable for Halloween. At least that's what she said.

[00:34:46] [SPEAKER_01] That person approached the car and ran south. Then her daddy got sick. He lay on the ground. Those were the only relevant statements she gave. Detectives also went to some of the witnesses who came up upon the scene.

[00:35:01] [SPEAKER_03] Corporal Santiago called Zoraida, one of the two sisters in the vehicle directly behind Jared's, and asked her more questions about the night of the murder. To confirm her movements, Zoraida sent Corporal Santiago her information from App360, showing exactly where she was. The only problem was the app showed the wrong timestamps. So Corporal Santiago got in touch with Zoraida's sister and fellow witness, Osiris.

[00:35:25] [SPEAKER_03] Osiris' accounting was the same as her sister's for the most part, and her Google timeline matched both of their statements, locations, and the known facts of the case.

[00:35:34] [SPEAKER_01] Sometimes in cases, applications and timestamps are just wrong. That's not suspicious. It just happens. The totality is more important than any one thing. I just stress that because I've seen cases where witnesses get dragged through the mud online over minor stuff, and I think it's important that the true crime community stops this.

[00:35:56] [SPEAKER_03] Corporal Santiago tried getting a hold of Jared, another witness, to set up an interview between him and Detective Johns. Only, there was a problem there. Jerge called back to say he was in New York. But the bad feelings he'd experienced the night before were seemingly dissipated, because he said he'd be happy to call or text to set that interview up when he returned to Florida.

[00:36:16] [SPEAKER_01] There were other things to do in the meantime. Officer Jarman asked Corporal Santiago to contact Shane, another one of the witnesses. The police needed elimination prints because Shane had touched Jared's SUV.

[00:36:29] [SPEAKER_03] But there was another problem. Shane was a truck driver. He was on his way to Wisconsin by then. He wanted to help, though. He asked his company's dispatch to send him back to Florida after he dropped his load up north.

[00:36:42] [SPEAKER_01] Meanwhile, remember that Gabriel Harriet lead? He was the mentally ill homeless man who allegedly lived in the woods near the murder scene.

[00:36:49] [SPEAKER_03] Detective Lamont was on that. On February 18th, 2022, at 1 p.m., he tracked down Harriet. That was at the South Beach Regional Shopping Center in Jacksonville Beach. That is a four-minute drive from the intersection where Jared was killed. And a 15-minute walk. He needed to talk to Harriet because detectives have found something very important.

[00:37:09] [SPEAKER_01] The surveillance video from Grande Boulevard appeared to show a man who looked like Harriet heading northbound to Jacksonville Drive.

[00:37:18] [SPEAKER_03] There was one problem, though. Gabriel Harriet was often not lucid. This time was no exception. He couldn't give Detective Lamont coherent answers. He wasn't there, he said. But his twin brother might have been. Pointedly, Detective Lamont wrote in his report, it should be noted, Harriet does not have a twin brother.

[00:37:45] [SPEAKER_01] Next week, rumors fly in Florida, investigators hunt for a possible stalker, and those who knew Jared start coming forward about the main source of strife in his life. Thanks so much for listening to The Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail dot com. If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime,

[00:38:13] [SPEAKER_01] please report it to the appropriate authorities.

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[00:38:41] [SPEAKER_01] Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for The Murder Sheet, and who you can find on the web at kevintg.com.

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