Jared Bridegan: Henry Tenon, the Chain That Reached Him, and the Moments Nobody Interrupted | Pt. 5

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Somewhere in the monster years before February 16th of 2022, someone knew something was wrong.

Maybe not the whole picture, maybe not the specific plan of the specific night,

the specific road. But somewhere in the circle of people around this situation and the extended

family and the friendships and the day-to-day orbit of the people allegedly involved,

someone had a feeling they couldn't entirely justify. Something that sat wrong,

something that made them wonder briefly, whether this was going somewhere bad and then they

told themselves, yeah, it's probably nothing. I'm not saying that to assign blame beyond the people

who have been charged. I'm saying it because it's almost certainly true because it's almost

always true in cases like this and because it's the piece we talk about the least. We are very

good as a culture at examining the people who did something terrible. We are considerably less

good at sitting with the experience of the people who were close enough to see something

building, had a feeling they couldn't name and didn't know what to do with it. This episode

is about those people and I want to be honest with you, it's about you. It's about me because

most of us have been in that position at some point in our lives watching someone we know escalating

ways that made us uncomfortable telling ourselves, it's probably fine waiting for a clearer

sign before we said or did anything telling ourselves it probably wouldn't go that far.

Does it sound familiar? Good. This will be for you and for me. Your thoughts as we work

through it in the comment section on substack and YouTube links are in the description. What I

want to examine today is why we do that. Why that response is so consistent, so human, so

understandable and what it costs when we're wrong. This is our final episode and our five part

series about the murder of Jared Brightigan. And before I get into it, I want to take a breath

and acknowledge where we've been for episodes this week, for distinct psychological angles on

the same case. Three are the years of custody, conflict. You know, allegedly consume someone's

entire identity and made a man's existence feel like a problem to be solved. The husband with

no personal reason who allegedly absorbed someone else's war so completely that he made it his own,

the children who were inside it from the beginning and will carry the weight of all of it,

the rest of their lives, the woman who refused completely relentlessly at enormous personal cost

to let her husband's murder become another cold case. All four of those episodes were in different

ways about how people respond to the situations they find themselves in. This one asks something

different, not what happened, not who did it, but where were the moments in the arc of this case

when someone could have interrupted it? Where were the points in the chain above the road,

above the tire, above the night of February 16th when a different choice by a person in the orbit

of this situation produces a completely different outcome because those moments existed. They almost

always do. And understanding why they go unused is I think the only genuinely useful thing,

a case like this leaves us. Henry Tenan has fled guilty to second degree murder in the killing

of Jared Brightigan. So the situation has had its complexity. They've been reports of a possible

desire in his part to withdraw that plea, which has not happened as of this recording. His

admission that he was on the road as part of the public record. He's agreed to testify against

Shanna Gardner and Maria Fernandez at the trial currently scheduled for August of 26.

He was the last link in a chain and chains have more than one link and every link above the last

one is a person who made a decision or didn't make one and kept the chain intact.

The kept it moving towards that road. A murder for hire doesn't happen between two people in

isolation. It requires communication, agreement at minimum one additional person beyond the two who

allegedly wanted the outcome. And in this case, an additional person which someone already inside

the orbit Fernandez own tenant, the man who was paying him rent. Someone Fernandez have been

in proximity too long enough to form a specific assessment of. You don't approach your tenant

with a proposition like this unless you've been watching him,

unless you've been over time and from close quarters, forming a judgment about what he might do

have asked. That judgment doesn't happen in a moment of desperation. It happens in accumulation

of proximity. It is in its own cold way a careful calculation, which means there was a period

during which all of this was being sought thought through, during which people in proximity to

the situation, to the household, to the relationship, to the planning were potentially close enough

to observe something even if they didn't have the full picture. Every one of those people was a potential

interruption point. Every one of those interruption points led to that road without breaking.

Let me explain something about how the human brain handles this kind of situation because I think

it's important. And I think it's the reason this pattern shows up in case after case after case.

We are terrible at treating a future danger as a present emergency. We are wired at a pretty

fundamental level to respond to what is directly in front of us. Something is actively happening

right now. We react. Something is an immediate danger. We step in. That instinct is strong and it works

well for a lot of situations. But pre-violence, the theory before something terrible happens when

the warning signs are present, but the act hasn't occurred. Ask something completely different from

us. It asks us to treat a probability as though it were already a fact to respond to what might

happen with the same urgency. We bring to what is happening. And we are genuinely not built for that.

Clearly. We're not. You, me. I think some of us are better than others that are identifying it.

But when it comes to actual acting, yeah. But we also have lots that exist, that prevent action

most of the time as well. When someone in our lives is escalating, getting darker, more obsessive,

more organized and their hatred of a specific person, the brain runs a quick calculation. Okay.

But what are the actual chances? People I know don't actually do things like this. This is

probably just a really hard period. It'll probably settle down soon. And here's the maddening truth.

That calculation is statistically defensible. The overwhelming majority of people who exhibit

escalating anger, consuming obsession, or alarming patterns in the context of a personal conflict

do not commit violence. Most difficult situations don't become dangerous ones. So the person who

tells themselves it probably won't go that far is making a reasonable assessment of probability

most of the time, most of the time. But here's the second layer to this that goes beyond the statistics.

And I think this, this one is actually harder. Saying something has a cost. If you look at someone

in your life and decide that what you're seeing is genuinely dangerous, and you say something about

it, you make a call, you raise a flag, you create a record somewhere, and you turn out to be wrong.

There are real consequences for that. Relationships gets complicated, damaged,

destroyed. You become the person who overreacted, made false claims, who was dramatic, who made

something out of nothing. You carry the social weight of having named something that didn't materialize.

That cost is real. And the rational internal voice, the one that's always doing a quiet cost

benefit calculation on your behalf almost always decides based on that cost to wait.

To hold on for a clearer sign. To keep the observation private for now, and to see if it gets

worse before doing anything about it. Most of the time that voice is giving us

reasonable advice, but it cannot account for the times when waiting is the thing that makes it

too late. It cannot factor in the specific cases where the thing you were waiting for is a clearer

sign. It cannot tell you in the moment whether the situation you're watching is the 95 percent

that doesn't escalate, or the 5 percent that does. And that's the part that stays with people.

The 5 percent, the situation where the instinct to wait to not overreact, to not create conflict,

to see if it gets worse before doing anything turns out to have been the choice that made the worst

outcome possible. Let me connect this directly to the bride again case. Not to name anyone beyond the

people who have been charged, but to be honest about the structure of what the chain required.

Murder for higher of this kind contracted plan carried out through an existing relationship

does not stay entirely invisible in the people around it. There are conversations. There is

behavior. There are things said and unsaid that exist in the daily world of the people allegedly

involved. None of that raises to the level of evidence in a legal sense. Most of it probably

looked to anyone who encountered it like nothing more than a unhappy household with an ongoing

conflict. But the research on targeted violence is consistent. In retrospect, in case after case,

the people closest to the situation had pieces, maybe not the whole picture, usually not in anything

that would have produced an arrest, but pieces, observations, moments where something

felt often away. They couldn't entirely articulate. And the thing that keeps those pieces from being

acted on is the same thing that keeps them from being acted on in almost every case. The calculation

that is probably not as serious as it feels probably won't go that far. That you're not sure enough

to say something that the social cost of being wrong is too high. I want to close this series with

something direct, not a summary, not a bow on the package, just just something true.

Most of the people listening to this at some point watch someone escalate, watch to friends

anger, become their whole personality, watch to family members obsession with a conflict,

get darker and more consuming over time. Watch someone they know move from, I hate him

to something that felt in your gut like it had become more than that. And most of us told

ourselves some version of the same thing. I'm not sure enough. It probably won't go that far.

If it gets worth worse, I'll say something. The research and people who do eventually

intervene, who make the call, name the thing, tell someone, create the record shows that about 95%

of the time they feel foolish because most of the time they were right that it wasn't going to go

that far. Most escalating situations don't. The intervention feels disproportionate because the

outcome it was trying to prevent doesn't happen. 95% of the time you feel you overreact. 5% of the time

it was the only thing that would have mattered. And for me, inside a specific moment,

watching a specific person, there is no reliable way to know which situation you are in. Jared

Bridegan was a father of four, a Microsoft executive, a man who had coached his kids and built a real

second life and tried. Every available channel to communicate that something was wrong with the

situation he was in. He was one mile from home on a road. He'd driven a hundred times when the

chain reached him. Every link in that chain had a person attached to it. Somewhere above the last

link, there was a moment when someone could have broken it. We'll never know with certainty whether

anyone was close enough, whether the information was there in a form that made action possible.

I don't know. Someone accepting the order of carrying out a hit might have figured that out.

We know what the research tells us about what happens when it is. We know what we tend to do. We

know what we tell ourselves. That knowledge is the only genuinely useful thing this case leaves us

with. Be a waste not to use it. Your thoughts in the comments section on Substack and YouTube.

We'll keep watching this story and we will cover the trial when it comes up later this year.

Looking forward to getting your thoughts. Hope we gave you a little

window into this world, into this case. If you're not familiar with it, there's a lot to come.

In the coming months. All right. Comments, discussion, YouTube, Substack, link in the description.

We'll continue with there. Until next time I'm Tony Bursky. We'll talk again real soon.

Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime

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