Jared Bridegan: Bexley Was in the Backseat — What This Murder Did to the Children Left Behind | Pt. 3

¿Quieres mejor internet?

Cogs internet de 300 megas tiene las velocidades rápidas y confiables que buscas.

Perfecto para streaming y gaming y trabajar desde casa.

Todo por solo $45 dólares al mes cuando agregas Cogs Mobile.

Incluye equipo de Wi-Fi y garantía de precio de 2 años en tu plan.

No esperes.

Gámbite hoy a Cogs.

Requiere Cogs Mobile que hay que alimentar garantía de precio

y no incluyen puestas y cargos velocidades de datos móviles

a reducer después de 20 gigas al mes.

Tala Redic here from 2311 Racing.

Another checkered flag for the books.

Time to celebrate with Chamba.

Jump in at chambacacino.com.

Let's Chamba.

No purchase necessary.

BGW Group, voidware prohibited by law.

CCNC, 21 plus, sponsored by Chamba Cacino.

Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck.

I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

With family, conoles, and spins mean everything.

Now, you want to get mixed up in the family business.

Introducing the Godfather at chambacacino.com.

Test your luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slot.

Someday, I will call upon you to do a service for me.

Play the Godfather.

Now at chambacacino.com.

Welcome to the family.

No purchase necessary.

BGW Group, voidware prohibited by law.

21 plus terms and conditions apply.

This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brusky.

Here now, Tony Brusky.

Brexley Brotigan was two years old on February 16, 2022.

She was in the backseat when her father stopped the car.

She was in the backseat when he was shot.

She was there, president strapped in two years old.

For the last moments of Jared Brotigan's life.

And then she was the first thing that

was seen when that door opened, a toddler alone without her dad.

I want to stay here for a minute before we move anywhere else

because the coverage of this case tends to note that detail and then move on.

As we do in so many cases, like, and the kids suffered and they went somewhere else to

be safe.

So often it's the suspects that charges, the legal proceedings.

I understand why.

There's a lot to cover.

But I think we do something wrong when we move past it too quickly.

Because Brexley Brotigan, being in that car, is not a side detail to the story.

It is its own story about what this case actually cost and specifically precisely

who was made to pay it.

This episode is for the children, all of them.

Brexley who was in that backseat in the twins, Jared's daughters, the two that he had

with Shanna Gardner, spent years being moved between two houses at war with each other

and who will spend the rest of their lives carrying something about their own family

that no child should ever have to hold.

And honestly, it's for everyone listening who spent any part of their childhood in the

middle of something like this, hopefully not this extreme, but something that rhymes

with it because there's a lot of you.

And this experience almost never gets talked about, honestly.

So before we go further, I want to mention a piece of this case that doesn't get nearly

enough attention.

After Jared was murdered, there was a legal dispute over custody of the twins.

And it was settled.

Full guardianship was granted to Shanna Gardner's parents, her mother and father in Washington

state.

The Bridegain family was given visitation rights.

The children went to live with the family of the women accused of killing their father.

Not because anyone made a cruel choice because those were the options, the situation produced.

And the system working exactly as it was designed landed there.

Just the world these kids are now growing up and that fact deserves more than just kind

of a passing mention here and there.

So let me describe what it actually feels like to be a child inside a high conflict custody

situation, not the legal terminology, the real daily lived experience of it.

You figure out early, sometimes before you're in kindergarten, sometimes even earlier,

that you are caught in the middle of something that has nothing to do with you and everything

to do with you at the same time.

The two people you love the most are in a conflict and you by existing, by moving between

their two worlds are somehow a piece of that conflict whether you want to be or not.

You start reading rooms, you get very good, very fast, picking up on emotional weather.

You learn which names don't get said in which house, you learn which questions land

wrong.

Develop a sense finally tuned and constantly operating of what is safe to bring up and

what should stay in your chest.

You figure out which version of the week's events is okay to share at the other house

in which part needs to stay quiet because you've learned through experience what happens

when certain information travels.

You present differently in each place, not because you're being deceptive, but because

you've learned that showing up as your full, integrated self in either house comes

with risks that feel too high so you split.

You build parallel versions of yourself for parallel households, you become fluent

in the emotional language of each parent separately in ways that would never recognize because

they can't see what you look like in the other house.

And the outside of the child looks resilient, adaptable, handling it well.

All those words that we use to tamper down the damage that's going on for that child

in real time.

They're not handling it.

They are fragmenting quietly and visibly in ways that won't fully surface until years

later.

Sometimes in a therapist's office, sometimes in a relationship pattern, sometimes in an

exhaustion, they can't explain.

There's a word for one specific part of what happens to kids in these situations.

Perentification.

And it doesn't mean what most people think it means when they first hear it.

It doesn't mean the child doing extra chores.

It doesn't mean a kid being asked to grow up a little faster than their peers.

It means something more specific and more damaging than that.

It means the emotional needs of the parent begin to be met by the child instead of the

other way around.

The child becomes the confidant, the ally, the person, the parent, processes the conflict

through.

The insidious thing about it is that it almost never requires a parent to explicitly ask

for this.

It doesn't require a deliberate decision.

It happens through small interactions.

Something as small as ordinary as the way a parent's face changes when a certain name

comes up.

And the child who's been watching that face for their whole life and is exquisitely

attuned to what it means understands without being told that it's their job to manage

that change, to avoid triggering it, to steer conversations away from certain places,

to monitor the emotional temperature of the room, the way a much older person monitors

a much more formal situation.

A child is working in a way that no child should have to work.

They are doing emotional labor for an adult before they have ever had this space to figure

out what their own emotions even are.

And the cost of that, carried into adulthood, is real and well-documented.

The adult who grew up, parentified, tends to become someone who is hyper aware of everyone

else's feelings in every room they enter, who struggles to identify their own needs

because they spend so many years focused on someone else's, who is exhausted in a way

that they can't quite explain because they've been responsible for other people's

equilibrium since they were small, who finds relationships complicated in very specific

ways that trace back when they finally have language for it, to the job they were doing

before they were old enough to be hired for anything.

And if that lands for you or if you're hearing this and recognizing something from your

own growing up, you're not alone and you're not imagining it.

It was real and it has a name and it cost you something.

If you want to share your story with a community that is very likely also listening to this

and finding similarities and talking about it, you can join in that conversation in our

comments section on YouTube and sub-stack.

The links are there in the description.

In the broadigan case, the twins were navigating some version of this for years moving between

two households that were in open, sustained conflict, caring whatever that meant, the split

selves, the monitored conversations, the calibration of which version of themselves

was appropriate where, and then there's what they will eventually fully understand

about how it ended.

I want to be careful here because these are real children who are still growing up

but I also think being honest about the weight of what they carry matters more than being

overly delicate.

So let me just say it plainly.

The twins growing up allegedly in the household of the people who arranged their biological

fathers murder and they had breakfast with those people.

They were driven to school by them, were tucked in by them, built the entire ordinary

texture of childhood in that house.

There is no developmental stage that prepares a child to integrate that information.

There's no age at which someone can explain it to them in a way that doesn't fundamentally

alter something inside of them.

They'll be working through what it means quietly across decades and therapy offices and

late nights and moments that catch them off guard for the rest of their lives.

Not because of anything they chose, because of what the adults around them allegedly chose.

And now they lay with Shana Garner's parents in Washington State on visitation terms with

the Bridegain family.

Again, not because of cruelty or oversight because those were the legal options available.

After a long legal fight between the two families.

But the result is children being raised by the family of the woman accused of killing

their father.

The system working exactly is designed.

And I'm not saying that may not be the best thing for them.

I don't know.

But the mental gymnastics of this shit show?

Oh my God.

Brexley's situation is its own specific that a thing in it deserves its own specific

attention.

She almost certainly won't have a clear retrievable narrative memory of that night.

Children under three generally don't retain explicit memories in the way older kids do.

In some ways, that is a mercy.

But here's what the research on early childhood trauma is absolutely clear about the absence

of a conscious memory does not mean the absence of impact.

The body keeps records that the mind doesn't.

The nervous system encodes the experiences of overwhelming fear of catastrophic loss

of a world that has revealed itself is suddenly and completely unsafe.

And it carries those recordings out as memories you can describe.

It is responses, hyper vigilance, disrupted attachment, a baseline sense that the world

is a place where terrible things can arrive without warning and without explanation.

Brexley Brite again is growing up.

She will reach an age where she can read or she can search her own name where she will

encounter not just her father's story, but her own because she was there.

She was in the car.

It happened to her body on that road when she was too young to have any agency in any

of it.

She has a mother who was fought for her ferociously since that night Jared was killed.

That's not nothing.

That's everything.

In a situation with very few things to hold on to, but it doesn't change what she carries

into the day.

She fully understands.

Let's close this episode with an observation because I think it matters beyond this one case.

The family court system adjudicates legal disputes.

It processes filings.

It holds hearings.

It sees parents at their most composed, making their most organized argument inside a formal

setting.

It does what it was built to do.

It was not built to see the child who stopped mentioning the other parents name at dinner

because they learned what happens in the room when they do.

It was not built to identify the kid who has been managing parents' emotions since they

were in preschool.

It has no procedural mechanism for the slow, invisible fragmentation of a child growing

up as a piece of someone else's conflict.

The children in this case were referenced in every filing.

They were the stated reason for every hearing.

They were on paper the entire point of the legal process that kept running for years.

And that process for all that had processed had no way to ask the one question that mattered

most.

What's actually happening to these kids right now?

In size, this thing we keep adjudicating.

That's not an individual failure.

That's a structural one.

And it's worth naming every time a case like this comes up because it will keep being

true until something changes about the how the system is built.

Both sets of children in this story are still growing up.

Both sets are carrying things.

No child should have to carry.

None of them chose any of it.

None of them had any say in the decisions that put them where they are.

Calling that collateral damage is the least honest thing we can do with what happened here.

It was the cost and the people who paid it were the ones never had a vote.

Give us your thoughts in the comments section on YouTube and substack.

Love for you to weigh in and we'll continue that conversation right there.

Until next time, my name is Tony Bursky.

We will talk again real soon.

Drew McIntyre here from WWE.

Wheeled in the claymore can be a life of chaos.

When I'm not dominating in the ring, Chumba Casino is how this warrior takes a wee break.

With hundreds of online social games and new weekly releases, there's always something fresh to try.

And those daily boosts, next level, even my free time feels like foul hallam.

So when life feels like a battle, kick up your feet, have some fun.

And let's Chumba.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group.

Boyd were prohibited by law, CTs and Cs.

21 plus sponsored by Chumba Casino.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group.

Boyd were prohibited by law, CTs and Cs.

Step into the world of power, loyalty and luck.

I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

With family, conoles and spins mean everything.

Now, you want to get mixed up in the family business.

Introducing the Godfather at chumbacacino.com.

Test your luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slot.

Someday, I will call upon you to do a service for me.

Play the Godfather.

Now at chumbacacino.com.

Welcome to the family.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group.

Boyd were prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

Victory Lane?

Yeah, it's even better with Chumba by my side.

Race to chumbacacino.com.

Let's Chumba.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group.

Boyd were prohibited by law, CT and Cs.

21 plus sponsored by Chumbacacino.

Looking for excitement, Chumbacacino is here.

Play any time, play anywhere.

Play on the train.

Play at the store.

Play at home.

Play with your board.

Play today for your chance to win.

And get daily bonuses when you log in.

So why are you waiting for, don't delay.

Chumbacacino is free to play.

Experience social gameplay like never before.

Go to Chumbacacino right now to play hundreds of games, including online slots.

Bingo, slingo, and more.

Live the Chumbacacino.com.

Live the Chumbacacino Live at chumbacacino.com.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group.

Boyd were prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply.

Now that's all right.

Ready to hit the throttle?

Get in the driver's seat and head to chumbacacino.com.

Let's Chumbacacino.

Sponsored by Chumbacacino.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group.

Boyd were prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply.

Toleretic here from 2311 Racing.

Victory Lane?

Yeah, it's even better with Chumbacacino by my side.

Race to chumbacacino.com.

Let's Chumbacacino.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group.

Boyd were prohibited by law, CT and Cs, 21 plus.

Sponsored by Chumbacacino.