The Prosecutors Who Just Won Asked Their Own Judge to Step Down, Celeste Rivas Hernandez's Parents File Suit, and No Jury in Largo

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. We told you yesterday we would be on the Largo trial every day this week, so that is where we start. A plastic surgeon is defending himself against a first-degree murder charge with no lawyer, no jury, and none of the motions his own attorneys filed in a case where the state of Florida is asking a judge to have him executed. In Los Angeles, the parents of Celeste Rivas Hernandez have sued, not just the man charged with killing their 14-year-old daughter. They have also sued his mother and his managers, and the theory is that the adults around him should have protected her.

0:54 And in Jacksonville, something happened in the Jared Bridegan case that I have genuinely never seen before. His widow asked a judge to step down. So did the prosecutors. The same prosecutors who just won a first-degree murder conviction in that judge's courtroom asked her to remove herself from the case. She said no to both of them. Let's get into it. Stephen Causey was 41 years old. He was an attorney. On March 21st, 2023, he walked into his office building wearing a red sweater, stepped away from his desk to use the restroom, and was never seen again. His body has never been found. He was representing a client in a billing dispute against a plastic surgeon named Tomasz Kasowski.

1:38 Kasowski is 47, Ivy League educated, and by the account of people in his field, was once regarded as a pioneer in reconstructive surgery. He is pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, and he is presumed innocent. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. His trial began yesterday in Pinellas County, and since I told you the outline Monday, let me give you what the state actually says it has, because it is substantially more than I laid out. Investigators say surveillance video shows a man arriving at Kazi's office building in a pickup truck, going inside carrying a backpack, gloves, and a large box. Two hours later, the same man comes out wearing a different outfit, pulling a large cart with something on top of it. Police say they found blood in the restroom of that office. They say Kazi's DNA was in the trunk of Kosowski's vehicle. And when they arrested him, according to court records, they recovered a bloodied ballistic vest, duct tape, a paralyzing agent, syringes containing sedatives, brass knuckles, a taser, and roughly $ 300, 000 in cash. Those are allegations. None of it has been proven. And starting yesterday, one man in a black robe is the only person who will ever weigh it. Because here is the thing that makes this trial unlike any other in the country right now. Kosowski fired his lawyers. He waived his right to a jury twice, once for guilt and once for the penalty phase, which Florida requires separately because the state

3:10 considers that decision that serious. He withdrew the motions to suppress evidence his own attorneys had filed, and he withdrew every motion challenging the death penalty. Judge Joseph Boulogne did not make this easy for him. The transcript of that exchange is worth hearing. Boulogne asked whether he understood his attorneys were experts in death penalty law. Kosowski said yes. Boulogne asked whether he understood that maybe he was not. Kosowski said yes. Bologna asked whether he still wanted to represent himself at a hearing about excluding the death penalty from his own case. Kosowski said yes. And then he said, I move that we strike them all. Bologna had told him something else that I keep thinking about. He told him that like a lawyer, he now had to decide what was in a client's best interest and that the only way the court could accept a jury waiver was if Kosowski told him he believed it was in his own best interest. So this man had to stand up and certify that giving away a jury in a capital case was good for him. And when Bologna asked why, he said, I really have to answer that. And the judge let it go. A profile published this week added a detail that stayed with me. It reported that when Bologna asked why he wanted to represent himself, Kosowski smirked.

4:34 It also reported this. And it is the contradiction at the center of everything. Kosowski has asserted in court that he does not have a death wish, and he has also told a judge he wants nothing presented that might weigh against his execution. I am not going to try to square those two things, because I do not think they can be squared, and I am not qualified to try. What I will say is what I said yesterday. A judge who has watched this man for three years has found him competent, and that judge knows more than I do. A competent adult is allowed to make catastrophic choices about his own life. and a system that let judges override that would be worse than the one we have. The court did leave one door open. Jane McNeil, one of his former attorneys, was appointed to remain on standby in case he changes his mind. And Boulogne said that at the end of the guilt phase, he would check again whether Kosowski wants to keep representing himself. So if there is a conviction, there is one more moment where somebody asks him. One practical note about how this trial will run.

5:35 There is no jury. so there is nobody to send out of the room. Objections get argued in front of the person deciding the case. There is no jury selection, no opening statement aimed at 12 strangers, and no instructions at the end. That is why this is expected to move quickly. Stephen Causey was 41. He was doing the most ordinary thing a lawyer does in this country, which is represent a client in a lawsuit. His family has never had a body to bury. And there is one more thing about a case with no body that is worth understanding because it is going to come up all week. Florida does not require a body to prove murder. It never has. What the state has to establish is that a person is dead and that the defendant caused it.

6:22 And that can be built entirely out of circumstances. The last known movements, the forensic traces, the motive. The absence of any innocent explanation for a man vanishing from a bathroom in the middle of a workday and never touching a bank account again. Those cases are hard, and they are winnable. And in this one, the defendant just removed every procedural obstacle the state would ordinarily have to climb over. We will be on this one every day. Someone has to say his name. Celeste Hernandez was 14 years old.

7:05 She was from Lake Elsinore, California. On Sunday, she would have turned 16. Her parents, Mercedes Martinez and Jesus Rivas, marked that birthday by releasing a new photograph of her and asking publicly that the man charged with killing her face the death penalty. And last week, through their attorney Patrick Steinfeld, they filed a 20-page wrongful death lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The defendant is David Anthony Burke. who is 21 and performs under a stage name stylized with numbers. He has pleaded not guilty in the criminal case to first-degree murder with special circumstances, to one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child under the age of 14, and to one count of unlawful mutilation of human remains. A judge ordered him to stand trial in July.

7:52 He is presumed innocent of all of it. As always on this show, I am not going to walk you through the evidence in that case. Nothing about what was done to a 14-year-old girl is content, and if you want it, it is available elsewhere. The civil suit is a different thing, and it is worth understanding. It alleges wrongful death, battery, sexual battery, childhood sexual assault, assault, false imprisonment, human trafficking, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It claims the relationship began in November of 2023, when Celeste was 13. It seeks unspecified damages, punitive damages, and legal fees. All of that is an allegation. A complaint is a document one side writes. Nothing in it has been tested. Now here is the part that makes this legally interesting, and it is the part the coverage is mostly skipping. The suit does not stop at Burke. It also names his mother and his managers. And it accuses them of negligence, alleging that the adults and professionals around him helped facilitate a relationship with a child and failed to protect her over more than a year. That is the real reach of this filing, and it is the claim I will be watching. Because a negligence claim against a manager or a family member requires establishing that they owed a duty, that they knew or should have known, and that they could have acted. That is a genuinely hard case to make, and it is also the only mechanism in American law that ever forces the people around a powerful young man

9:23 to answer for what they saw and did nothing about. We have watched this argument play out in the music industry before, and in gymnastics, and in the Catholic Church. The person who did the harm is one defendant. The structure that kept them insulated is a much harder one, and usually a much more consequential one. Two practical points, and then the thing that matters. First, this civil case is almost certainly not going anywhere for a long time. When a defendant faces a capital eligible murder charge, courts routinely stay civil proceedings because a defendant cannot be deposed without surrendering his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Expect this to sit on a shelf until the criminal case is resolved. Second, there is a tension worth naming out loud. Two weeks ago, David Burke told a Los Angeles court he could not afford a lawyer, and a judge found him indigent and appointed the public defender. Testimony in his own case put his career earnings above $ 10 million. Celeste's family has said publicly they believe he is not broke and that the money is sitting in corporations. A civil suit is one of the few tools that can actually find out. Civil discovery reaches financial records that a criminal court never looks at.

10:39 If there are assets in an LLC somewhere, this is the proceeding that finds them. And I want to say one more thing, carefully. The family is publicly calling for the death penalty and simultaneously suing for money. I have seen people online treat that as a contradiction. It is not. Those are two entirely different systems with two entirely different purposes, and a family is allowed to use both. The district attorney has not decided whether to seek capital punishment. That decision is his, not theirs, and it will not be affected by a civil filing. What the lawsuit does say in the language of the complaint is that the conduct alleged was extreme and outrageous and exceeded all bounds of decency tolerated in a civilized community. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the legal standard for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and it is what a plaintiff has to prove. Celeste Rivas Hernandez was 14, Her parents waited more than a week after she was found before anyone could confirm it was her. On Sunday, they put out a new picture of their daughter because she would have been 16. There is one more thing in this filing worth flagging, and it is small and it is awful.

11:59 The complaint states that after her remains were found, her parents had to wait more than a week before anyone could give them a positive identification. That is what the emotional distress claim is actually about, not a legal abstraction. Eight days of two people in Lake Elsinore not being told for certain whether the child they were looking for had been found. Burke is due back in criminal court on October 19th. Someone has to say her name, and it is hers, not his. When we come back, a murder victim's widow and the prosecutors who won the case both ask the same judge to leave. Jared Breidgen was 33.

12:46 In February of 2022, he dropped his twins at their mother's house in Jacksonville Beach and was shot to death on a dark street while his two-year-old daughter sat in the back seat. On August 26th, a jury convicted Mario Fernandez-Saldana of first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony. Shauna Gardner, Breidgen's ex-wife and Fernandez-Saldana's wife, has pleaded not guilty and goes to trial in 2027. She is presumed innocent. Henry Tenen, the man the state says pulled the trigger, has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. And now the case has turned into something I have not seen before. Back in July, Shana Gardner's defense attorneys asked Judge London Kite to order Kirsten Breidegen, the victim's widow, to hand over her cell phone. Their theory was that she had been in contact with other witnesses and with prosecutors, and they wanted the data. Both prosecutors and Kirsten Bridegan's own attorneys objected. Their argument was that she is not a suspect in anything. She is a victim, and under Marzi's law, which is written into the Florida Constitution, crime victims are guaranteed fairness, privacy, and due process. Kite denied the request at first. Then she met with Gardner's attorneys privately. Neither the prosecutors nor Kirsten Bridegan's lawyers were permitted to attend.

14:08 Lawyers call that an ex parte meeting, meaning one side only. And after that meeting, Kite reversed herself and ordered Kirsten Breedigan to surrender her phone to a forensic firm hired by the defense team of the woman accused of arranging her husband's murder. She refused. On the fifth day of Fernandez Saldana's murder trial, in the middle of testimony, Kite learned that the order had not been complied with. She stopped the trial. She called attorneys in by Zoom. Gardner's lawyers sought criminal contempt, and according to reporting, the court was prepared to have the widow arrested. Kirsten Breidegen's attorneys filed an emergency petition with Florida's 5th District Court of Appeal that same day, and the appellate court stayed it.

14:52 And then both Kirsten Breidegen and the state attorney's office filed motions asking Judge Kite to disqualify herself. I want to stop there, because I do not think people appreciate how strange that is. Prosecutors almost never ask a judge to step down. They work in front of the same judges every week for their entire careers. Asking a judge to remove herself is a permanent thing to do to a professional relationship, and it is the kind of motion prosecutors file roughly never. The state attorney's office filed one anyway, in the middle of winning a murder trial in that judge's courtroom. Kite denied both motions. She called the widow's motion legally insufficient, which is the standard phrase and means she found it did not allege facts that would legally require her removal. She also said the court would abide by the appellate stay on the phone order. So Kirsten Breedigan's lawyers have gone to the 5th District Court of Appeal and asked for two things. A writ of certiorari to throw out the orders that led to the phone being turned over. And a writ of prohibition, barring Judge Kite from presiding over any future proceeding that directly involves Kirsten.

15:58 Their petition alleges something else that you should hear. They argue Gardner's attorneys may be seeking that phone data for reasons that have nothing to do with the murder case at all, and suggest it could actually be relevant to a custody dispute between Gardner's parents and Breitigan's parents. That is an allegation in a filing, and the defense has not answered it in anything I have read. But if it is right, then a woman whose husband was murdered was ordered to hand her private communications to the legal team of the person accused of arranging it, for use in a fight about grandchildren. Look, I'm going to be honest about the other side of this because there is one and it matters. Shanna Gardner is presumed innocent and she is facing life in prison. Her lawyers have an obligation to chase every piece of evidence that might help her.

16:47 And a defendant's right to prepare a defense is not a courtesy. If a witness has been coordinating with other witnesses, a defense team is entitled to know. That is not harassment. That is the job. And Judge Kite is the one who has to balance a defendant's constitutional rights against a victim's constitutional protections in a case where both are real and they are pointing in opposite directions. That is a genuinely hard call, and I am not in her chair. I also want to be clear that ex parte communication is not automatically improper. Judges have them routinely for scheduling, for sealed material, for warrant applications. For things that genuinely cannot be discussed in front of everybody, there are rules for it and they exist for real reasons. What I cannot get past is the shape of this particular one.

17:38 Reversing yourself on a contested order after hearing from one side, with the other side not in the room, is the thing that makes a ruling look like something other than a ruling. Even when the reasoning is sound, it is very difficult to explain to the person on the losing end of it. One more development, and then I will leave it. Mario Fernandez Saldana has filed for a new trial. His appellate attorney, Shannon Day, argues that the state's case had evidentiary gaps and that prosecutors filled them in during closing argument rather than with evidence. Specifically, that prosecutors told the jury missing location data meant he had turned his phone off and that missing text between him and Tennant had been deleted when neither was actually established by admitted evidence.

18:25 That is a real appellate argument. Closing argument is supposed to be a discussion of evidence, not a supplement to it. Whether it goes anywhere is a different question, and most motions for new trial do not. And there is a broader thing here that Marzi's law was supposed to fix and apparently has not. Florida voters wrote victims' rights into the state constitution in 2018. Fairness, privacy, due process. The whole point was that people who lose someone to a violent crime should not be treated as an inconvenience inside the machinery that follows. Kirsten Breidegen has sat in that courtroom for every day of this. She has given multiple depositions.

19:05 She has been subpoenaed by the defense. And last month, mid-trial, in the case about her own husband's murder, a court was prepared to hold her in contempt and have her arrested. Whatever the legal merits, that is a hell of a thing to put a widow through, and a constitutional amendment written specifically to prevent it did not prevent it. Jared Breidegen was 33 years old. He had four children. Four and a half years after he was killed, one man has been convicted, two more trials are pending, and his widow spent last month in court fighting to keep her own phone. Someone has to say his name. That's the show for Tuesday, September 15th. If you're on Apple and you would rather hear this without ads, there is a button at the top of your screen that says, listen uninterrupted.

19:56 It is $ 5 a month for this show, plus thousands of others from Calaroga Media, and the first 30 days are free. If you have already done it, thank you. You are the reason we are in your ears every morning. And if you're on Spotify, leave a comment about the Florida case. Should a judge have the power to stop a competent adult from giving away his own lawyer and his own jury when the state is asking to execute him? We are in Largo every day this week. Matthew Exton is sentenced Monday and he is facing up to 25 years. And two weeks from today, Lindsay Clancy is back in front of Judge Sullivan when Plymouth County should finally say whether it is trying that case all over again. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. On the Florida murder trial, Tomasz Kosawski has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. The surveillance description, the forensic findings, and the items described as recovered at his arrest are the state's allegations drawn from court records, and none of it has been proven. Reporting has differed on where the victim's office was located and on where prosecutors believe the body was taken, and we have not adopted one account over another. A judge who has presided over this case has found the defendant competent to waive counsel and a jury.

21:12 And nothing here is a suggestion otherwise or a diagnosis of anyone. On the Los Angeles case, David Anthony Burke has pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges and is presumed innocent. The civil lawsuit is a complaint filed by the plaintiff's attorney. Every allegation in it is unproven, including the allegations of negligence against his mother and his managers, who have not responded in court as of recording. We have deliberately not described the evidence or the circumstances of Celeste Rivas Hernandez's death. The district attorney's office has not announced whether it will seek the death penalty. On the Jacksonville case, Shauna Gardner and Henry Tennant have both pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent. And nothing said at Mario Fernandez Saldana's trial is evidence against either of them.

22:01 The suggestion that phone data may be sought for reasons connected to a custody dispute is an allegation contained in a petition filed by Kirsten Breidigan's attorneys. Judge Kite denied the disqualification motions as legally insufficient, which is a procedural finding. Mario Fernandez-Saldana has been convicted and his motion for a new trial is pending and unresolved. This episode discusses the killing of a child and the death penalty. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.