I've heard that there's a house that has some bodies in the basement.
Somebody told you that Shakaia was a victim of human trafficking.
I'm come to find out. This is like it exploded into this huge thing.
I knew, I just knew the move wrong.
Police say thirty three year old Jared brid Agan was shot dead.
I kept calling his phone during the drive.
Gunned down in front of his two year old daughter. It's a murder of the stun Jack Speach neighbors.
His murder has attracted national attention, with the investigators saying he was targeted.
Eventually, a police officer answered and told me to come to the police station.
Justice is something that takes different shapes or forms.
If you know something, heard something, please it's never too late to do the right thing.
So I'm Dana Thompson aka Body Movin, and.
I'm John Green. For about a decade, Deanna and I spent a lot of time on the Internet, especially in the underbelly of the Internet, trying to identify and get animal abusers arrested.
We spent countless hours scouring the dark web helping catch predators. We spent over a year and a half trying to get law enforcement to take us seriously about a man that was killing cats online and he was threatening to move on to kill humans. And that was Luca mcnatdah.
Yeah, you might have heard about the Netflix special called Don't Fuck with Cats.
That's us. Well, now we're turning our online investigative skills to some of the most unexplained, unsolved, and just ignored cases.
This is True Crimes, the production of iHeartRadio and KT's Studios.
So let's explain how the season is going to work. We're going to investigate a few cases. We never know where they're going to lead.
But our hope is at a minimum, maybe we can bring attention to these cases that are being under investigated and just maybe in discussing them on our podcast, we can provide information to law enforcement that moves this investigation forward.
Right, So, our first case the season is the murder of Jared Bride Again. He's a thirty three year old Microsoft executive that was shot while driving back to his home in Saint Augustine, Florida.
Jared had just dropped off his nine year old twins at his ex wife's house. We've all heard about this case online, but.
News reports only provide a sliver of the story. We're hoping his wife Kirsten can fill us in more about that night.
On February sixteenth, the Wednesday night, Jared left and he took our daughter Bexley, who was two, with him on what is referred to as date night. In his divorced agreement with his ex, they had it listed so they had fifty to fifty custody of the kids Name and Abbie, the twins, and so on the weeks that they were at our home, his ex wife Shanna would take them on date night on Wednesdays, and then when they were at her home the next week, then Jared would take
them on date nights. So that's what he left to do. Our daughter alwaysn't with him. She loves being with her dad like she's always with them. So he left our house about like five point fifty that evening and then picked up Lemon Abbey from his ex's house, took them to dinner at this barbecue restaurant. They got ice cream.
And I know this because my stepdaughter Abby had texted me from the restaurant on Jared's phone and told me what they were doing and what they were eating, and then after he dropped Leam and Abbey back off at his ex's house, he called me. This is like seven forty seven in that evening, and so it was a quick, quick call. I hung up, and it was probably within a minute or two that he was shot. And so
what happened is he was on his usual route. We ninety nine percent of the time took the same route home. So he was on this road and there was a tire in the middle of the road and they believed that that is why he stopped. His emergency flashes were on and within you know, a few steps of exiting the vehicles, he was shot multiple times at close range, with our daughter and her part scene. So I was realizing he wasn't home. He usually is, and when he wasn't,
I started to get worried. It's so hard to explain, like I knew. I just knew something was wrong. My parents were at our house, and I told him, like, something's not okay, and the feeling was just so strong, and he wasn't answering me. I kept calling his phone, and eventually a police officer answered and told me to come to the police station. And it was later that night that they confirmed that Jared had been killed.
It's just a tremendous losstery in your family, and I'm very very sorry.
One of the things I loved and missed most about him, which might sound strange, are his hands. Like he just had such strong hands. And I know that that probably sounds so weird to everyone, but like after Jared died, that was like the one thing that I really wanted was I just wanted to hold his hand again.
Yeah, just like we held hands, like I felt safe. Like that's the type of feeling and strengths that I got from him.
Can you tell us a little bit about Jared, just like who he was like as a person, I.
Would say a big driving portion and everything that he did. But how do I make memory as a family. So he was the type of dad that when it was raining and we would often build little boats out of hot clue and toothpick and then we would go outside and float them down, you know, the the curb, the gutter where the water flows.
He absolutely loved to do things with the kids. He and the kids had discovered a show called kraft Topia. It's like a kid's crafting competition, and the kids were really into it, and so Jared decided that we were going to have our own craft Topia competition with Leam and Abby. So we set the garage up with different stations filled with craft supplies that we got at the dollar store in Walmart, Like we just had crafts everywhere, and then Jared filmed it.
He like made this short little episode movie.
About them doing this competition, and like he just lived for making memories as a family, Like that is what brought him the most joy is seeing his kids, all of his kids and us bond and make memories that would last a lifetime.
And I think his background, you know, coming from a divorce, just furthered that desire to like utilize the time that he did have with his oldest two to really bond and make good memories together.
Jared's brother Adam also remembers him as creative and strong.
It's funny to hear Kirsen share about creating those boats in the rain, because we used to be that as kids. We grew up in North Carolina. We were a very very middle class family. You got four siblings and two parents who worked a lot, and so it was kind of us just as kids just playing out in the neighborhood trying to figure out what we're going to do.
Jared was always the creative one, and so we used to hang out with our friends, roam the street, but no one messed with Jared because you know, he was just he actually was a phenomenal wrestler because he was just naturally strong, you know. After wrestling, kind of just gravitated towards the arts and was just again creative. Love technology.
Jared and I got to actually work together at one of the companies I invested in and was able to actually bring Jared over and he kind of headed up the technology for the company and he would go out and he'd build them, and his coworkers loved him because he would just figure things out.
What did he do, like what was his job?
But he joined Microsoft in October. He was a senior design manager. He just managed designers, helped them to come up with, Hey, how can we improve the design of this product to make it easier for users to understand and use?
Okay, So he wouldn't have exposed like some accounting you know air. It wouldn't have been that kind of job like where Okay.
No, not at all.
One of the main reasons why Jared wanted to actually join Microsoft because him saying, hey, like now that we're having London, like it would be awesome if you know, Kirsen didn't have to work full time, and so he's like, so I'm going to start interviewing. But he really wanted Kirsen to be able to not have to work at Microsoft and help with the kids. And I know that that was a paramount to him.
Yeah, So I had actually resigned from my position like a month before. Actually he's less than a month. It was less than a month before he was killed.
Jared sounds like this really nice, cool, smart guy. He's got a really good job. So it doesn't seem like he was in any line of danger or his work involved him in anything particularly shady.
Yeah, and he sounds like he was a really good dad too. He had a challenge of raising twins that he split with his first wife, in addition to the two kids he had with Kirsten. But it still sounds like it was a really like happy and loving environment.
It sounds like they were making the best of it, right.
So you mentioned earlier on the day of the incident, you had a gut feeling. Can you what do you what do you mean, what was that gut feeling?
It's so hard to describe. I just got this feeling like something's not right. I look over at the clock and that's when I'm like, you should be home. And then my Mom's like okay, because she could tell I was getting a little not agitated that like not I was uneasy. I was like, he's usually back by now. No, like in my soul, I just I don't know how to say it, like I knew, like something is very wrong.
And and once I got in the car and started driving and he wasn't answering like I knew, and I told my mom I said I think he did, like I just knew. And then when the police officer answered and wouldn't respond to my question about is my husband okay, I just said, please come to the Jacksonville Beach Police Department. I was like, okay, well there's my answer, And especially when I said is my daughter okay? And I said she's okay, So I'm like all right. So they confirmed
Bexley's fine. They will not say anything about Jared. But once they started asking me what clothes he was wearing and did he have any markings on his body, that type of stuff. I was like, yep, no, that's exactly what it was. In my gut, I knew. And it's almost like Jared was there kind of warning me, like, hey, you know, I'm gone, just kind of giving me that pre warning, Like I honestly think he just kind of wanted to prep me for before some random person who's never met told me the news.
I'm so sorry.
This is the first time I'd heard about Jared's case and doing this podcast, and you know, a lot of the information that I kind of took at face value prima phasia was from media reports and it kind of seems slanted one way. But then after talking to Kirsten, you kind of get a really big impression that he was targeted.
Yeah, especially since like the tire is put right in front of his car basically, and there was nothing stolen. There was nothing taken from the vehicle, you know, his wallet, all his possessions.
But we still want to go through the research process and see if it could be something else, like a car jacking or a road rage incident. Let's stop here for a break.
We'll be back in a moment.
What can you tell me about the road Is this like a normal road that people would go down, or is it like isolated?
Typically when there's traffic, this is faster than going on the big multiple lane roads to get to the Highway. So it is a very very common route for our family and especially Jared, right, Like.
I guess what I'm trying to ask, is is it something like a stranger would know he would be on that road if he's coming back from her house, or would it be something that only people that have intimate details about Jared would know.
I firmly believe that there are only three people outside of Jared who knew that that was his route, and that's myself, his ex wife and her husband.
Did they look at the tire to see what kind of car it came from or anything like that?
They confirmed it was from a Ford f one point fifty.
And you think that that was placed there intentionally to get him to stop?
Right?
Yes? And the police have confirmed they believe it was a targeted Oh they did own word targeted attack. They believe this was specific for Jared.
Oh man, I'm so sorry, like truly, that's just terrible.
Thank you.
And your daughter was with him, and how old is she?
She was two and a half oh my gosh. And so we we had a black Volkswagen Atlas, the three row vehicle. She was in the second row, and there are bullet holes in the car. So it's actually very lucky that she wasn't struck by one of the bullets that went through the vehicle.
The tire is the big piece.
Of evidence, right, Yes, the tire. And they also caught surveillance footage of a Ford F one fifty in the area that they believe could be connected.
That's why I'm going with it. I'm looking at images from that security video. So I owned a Ford F one safety. I know where the spare tire is. It's in the back underneath the bed. You have to go underneath and unscore school. But I don't think the spare tire matches four existing tires the knife rooms.
It's just a spare tire.
So the image I see of a tire, it looks like one of the tires that would have been on the vehicle itself. Now that doesn't mean somebody could have taken the spare off, do it on and left this there, But I mean the tire looks deflated.
And I looked at the spare tire, did you look at it or not the spare, but the tire in the middle of the road.
I saw the picture of it.
Yes, was the air let out or did somebody stab the sidewalls.
With the knife?
Okay, that's what I want to talk about because it looks to me like there's like eight punctures in this tire.
That was my initial impression. But eight eight is overkill. You wouldn't need like one or two would let all there. What I'm thinking is is if they let the air out of the tire, that's what happens. That's what the tire.
The sidewalls kind of get that roop.
Like it dimples.
Yeah, did they say like they're like nice stabbings in the sidewalk of the tire? Was just the airlet out? Do you know any of that?
They haven't told me any of that, but they did say that the truck photos there is it does look like a spare or a different if a tire without a rim is on one.
Yeah, So of the four tires, one of them doesn't match the other three. It looks like somebody may have taken off the original tire and put the spare tire on. Yet that's where I'm going with it. There is a connection to this tire. There is maybe some connection to the security camera video of an F one fifty in the area. Obviously the big piece of evidence at the scene is this tire. So yeah, like the big connection. Do you know, is it like hard to find the
exact location where this happened? Is it like there's notress so like there's a building nearby? Right, That's the biggest thing for me. I want to look in the area and see and things like that. So that's what I would like to see. If you could send that to us, that would be great, just what we can get the lay of the land and see where everything was at. It's creepy to think maybe somebody snuck up on him or who knows, maybe their car was on the side
of the road. So yeah, that would be my big thing, a location. And do you believe that F one fifty in the security video is tied to Jared's incident?
Yeah?
I trust their judgment on that.
Yeah, that tire is going to have a ton of information or at best a fingerprint that the forensics can take off and run through a database and connect it to somebody who may own that vehicle.
Because there's going to be like a manufacturing stamp of some kind, a serial number, a lot number something.
How is Jared found another vehicle? Was it law enforcement?
Driving by the road where huge shot is kind of in the middle of a neighborhood. It's just this one stretch where it's wooded one there's a curb on the edge of the streets. You can't like go around things. There's trees, street signs. So people heard the shots. At least a couple of neighbors called nine online reporting gunshots, and then some other cars that pulled up within you.
Bexley was alone before she was pulled from the vehicle for over three minutes, so it took at least three minutes for someone else to physically be on the scene, although neighbors had called nine to one one reporting the gunshots. I know a bystander pulled Bexley from the car just over three minutes after the gunshots were caught by cameras in the area.
Do you know if they've looked at like ringing cameras and you know, things like that, Yeah, they.
Did canvass the area. Some people gave video. That's how they knew exactly what time the gunshots were fired. Interestingly enough, the police department is really close to his exit's house, so one of those images that's been shared is from their own camera. The police department.
Oh wow, Yeah, this is very active, so we have to be a little careful.
So there seems like there's a lot to go on. There was a lot of evidence laughed at the scene. The police can use this information to hopefully track down the person.
Yeah, and there we still have a lot of questions about the area, and it really helps to have Kirsten walk us through it.
The spot where he was, from my understanding, is between there's a street sign on one side and there's a tree directly on the other. So where the tire was from my understanding, was right in between those two things on the side. So even if he went over the curbs, he couldn't go around it.
It looked narrow, but it's just a one lane going one way and the other lane on the other side.
Yeah, that road splits one side and there's like a median down the middle. That's why I was like, why didn't he just drive around the tire?
Now I understand now that makes me yes, Yeah, so it's that yellow stop sign, yellow warning of a stop sign sign and then the tree over on the other side.
And so there's a lot of trees and palm trees and foliage for somebody to hide out if they wanted to write.
I believe there's a fence along. So this is too Yeah, this is twenty nineteen. I think there's a fence that's also up. You see those houses through the trees. I believe there's a fence there today.
And this is like my last question, but like a couple of days after Jared I was murdered, there was somebody like peeping up around your house or something.
Yeah, I believe it was a week after I had I was talking Bexley in the bed, so it's like seven after seven pm that night. I don't remember the exact time I could look. And I got a not occasion on my Apple watched the person in the driveway and I was like what, So I grabbed my phone and I looked and it's it's so blurry. I've gotten different cameras sens then, because it's just horrible footage, but it was. The video was analyzed by a special unit
and they confirmed that it is human. So a lot of people are like, oh, maybe it's a moth or you know, something on the camera or whatever. But it was confirmed by this specialized team that it is a human figure. So it was coming from across the front of my garage and then cut across the corner of the house and disappeared.
Oh my gosh, I can't imagine. Let's stop here for another quick break. When I went to bed the night we spoke with Kirsten, his wife, I was thinking about the ambush. I could not stop thinking about it. So Jared was shot, and he was shot multiple times from roughly three to four feet away. The neighbor heard the shots from across the street. He didn't hear anything else
at all. There were no arguments or raised voices. So the cops have basically said that he was ambushed, meaning that he literally just stopped, He turned his hazards on, opened up his door, got out, and was shot and there were bullet holes in the car door. The car had been struck by gunfire, and I verified that with an article from news for Jack's It's like a local detective. Sergeant David Young with the Jacksonville Police Department said Bride again was shot to death next to the driver door
of his SUV, which was also struck by gunfire. So I don't know how many shots hit Jared, and I don't know how many shots were in the car. There's a lot I don't know. But there are things that I do know. Are that a tire was in the middle of the road. Jared couldn't get around it. This is according to official reports, and he had to stop and get out to move the tire. And here's the thing, this is what I couldn't stop thinking about. You asked me what I was thinking about? Right, How do we
know that the tire was placed there? How do we know he was targeted? How do we know it wasn't a car that was there?
Or was there a tire in the road with the vehicle and a person acting like they had a flat tire they were replacing. Jared gets out of the car, person working on the said flat tire, stands up close out, a gun shoots him right, gets back in the car and drives off, but leaves the tire there. So I think that's the theory of the ambush.
Theory, right, Or was somebody like hiding in the woods and place the tire when they knew Jared was coming. Here's what I can let go of. If it was somebody targeted targeting him, like they want Jared, they would have to be in communication with one to two other people. Like he's coming now, he just turned down Fitz Street. He just turned down Jacksonville Drive. He'll be there in two minutes. Nobody's behind him, do you know what I mean?
It's coordinated right?
Either that or did they use like an air tag to follow him? Yeah, like did when he was eating ice cream on his date night while they were eating ice cream? Did somebody AirTag Jared's car? Did they look for air tags on the atlas, the Volkswagen Atliss Did you know what I mean? Like, how did they know Jared was coming in that there were no cars behind him?
That's the million dollar question right now. And nothing was stolen, Nothing was stolen out of the vehicle, nothing was stolen off with Jared's person.
It was just it was an assassination, right.
It appears to be an execution style of assassination. And from what we know so far, from the time the neighbors heard gunshot to the time police showed up, it was a very short amount of time. It was within five ten minutes.
The daughter that was in the backseat. This is something else I couldn't stop thinking about. I got on my watch and I did stop a timer for three minutes. She sat there for three minutes before a neighbor came and grabbed.
Her out of the vehicle.
Yeah, out of the vehicle. She sat there for three minutes.
She's in a.
Car seat while while this all transpired.
And I was thinking about that a lot. And I woke up the next morning and I found a subreddit dedicated to this, and I found a Facebook group dedicated to this. There is a lot on the internet about this, a lot.
This happened in February of twenty twenty two, so this is relatively new. It's an open case, but there's a lot out there for a short period of times. There's a lot of public interest in this case because there's a lot of relationship that goes along with this. And and every time I go back to so we were sent like a Google map pendpoint of where it happened, it's like every time I look at about like, that's the perfect location if you were going to do something, that would be it right.
I totally agree. I walked to the neighborhood and Google maps, and I was trying to figure out if somebody put a tire in the middle of the road, where would they put the truck. My understanding of the the way the police view this crime scene is that the truck was not on the road, just the tire right, So somebody is hiding in the wooded area off to the right.
They run to the middle street, drop the tire, run back to the wooded area, wait for Jared to park his car, and then walk out and shoot him, and then run back through the wooded area to the neighborhood. Sanctuary Way is the neighborhood right next to the wooded air and there is parking on the street in a cul de sac, and then drive away. The police have released images of a truck that they're looking for in relation to this crime, and the truck appears to have a spare tire on.
It, and so the tire that was left isn't a spare tire, it's the tire that would be on one of the regular tires. But police and their investigation came across some security camera footage that shows a four f one fifty and out of the four tires. One appears to be a spare, so it kind of fits in that. Well, right, maybe this is the truck that's related, because the tire laying in the road is the one that would have
been on here if the spare tire wasn't there. How stupid would a person be to use the tire from the truck they're driving? I know, I know, that's the that's the thing I know. So I mean, you've gone through all of this plan to do this, the timing and all that. Are you going to use it tire from your eh? It just seems odd?
John, Oh my god, I need to tell you about this. John. This is like a really weird coincidence and it shows like behavior patterns that are kind of scary. So I really think Kirsten needs to be alerted to this, if she's not already.
Yeah, I agree, let's call her.
Hi, Kirsten. I read something earlier today. It was very strange. It was about Jared's ex wife, Shana's husband, Mario. It was about him killing cats.
I actually didn't know that until it was recorded by that new source. So that was a surprise to me, and I have not been surprised by much that was in surprise to me.
The thing that stood out to me, John, was that not only is he possibly killing cats, but he's doing it in a really inhumane way. Listen, I'm jumping to conclude here, please, you know, like keep this in mind, but almost like he wants the cats to suffer, you know, like die slowly. So that really stood out to me, and that's why I wanted to ask about it. I
didn't know if you had any inside information. We'll definitely get into that too, because you know, I mean, it's deviant behavior, right, and it shows like a lack of empathy that you would need in order to do this kind of like cold blood of killing. And we have lots of experience with that particular issue. More on that next time.
True Crimes is executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Deanna Thompson, Courtney Armstrong, Jeff Shane, Andrew Arnaut and me John Green. Additional producing by Connor Powell and Gabe Castile. Editing by Jeff twih Music by Vanikor Music.
True Crimes is a production of iHeart Radio and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, please visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.