Thomas Stein Sentenced to Life Plus 45 in Kayla Rincon-Miller's Murder, the Bridegan Murder-for-Hire Fight Over the Widow's Phone, and a WD-

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime Injustice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it's Tuesday, July fourteenth, twenty twenty six, last Friday, in a courtroom in Fort Myers, Florida, and eighteen year old stood up, prying and asked the judge for one thing before the deputies took him away. Could he hug his family? And the judge looked at him and said, no, you can say goodbye, but there will be no physical contact. And in about a minute we're going to talk about that no, because a lot of people are going to hear that headline and feel something about it. But before we do, I want you to hear another name, because she's the reason anybody was in that room at all. Kayla ringcon Miller, fifteen years old.

0:52 She went to the movies with two friends, and she was walking to get something to eat afterward, and she never made it home. Nobody offered k a goodbye, So keep her in your head while we go through this one, because I intend to. Then we're going to Jacksonville, where the woman accused of hiring a hitman to kill her ex husband is now in a fight over his widow's cell phone, and the prosecutors have a word for what the defense is doing. And we're going to close in Massachusetts with one of the stranger attempted murder cases you're going to hear this year, A friend alone and a rag soaked in WD forty three cases. Let's get into it.

1:36 Here's where things stand as of this recording. In Lee County, Florida, eighteen year old Thomas Stein has been sentenced to life in prison plus forty five years after a jury convicted him of first degree felony murder in the twenty twenty four shooting death of fifteen year old Kayla Rink and Miller. Because Stein was sixteen at the time, his life sentence is guaranteed a review after fifteen years, but the additional forty five years would still remain. In Jacksonville, SHAWNA Gardner thirty nine, and her husband Mario Fernandez Saldana, thirty eight, have pleaded not guilty to charges that they orchestrated the twenty twenty two murder for higher killing of Gardner's ex husband Jared Bright. Again. On Monday, Gardner's defense was in court fighting for access to the phone of Bridgin's widow Kirsten and prosecutors are calling it a fishing expedition. And in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Phyllis Palazzola has been indicted on charges of attempted murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and intimidating a witness after a longtime friend alleged that Palazzola tried to kill her with a w D forty soaked rag over an unpaid loan. Palazzola is due to be arraigned on July twenty first. Everyone charged in these cases is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Let's take them one at a time, story one the hug and the girl who never got one. Let's start with Kayla, because she deserves to be more than a head line about somebody else's tears. Kayla ringcon Miller was fifteen years old on the night of March seventeenth, twenty twenty four.

3:09 She was doing the most ordinary thing a fifteen year old can do. She was out with two friends. They'd been to a movie in Cape Corral, and they were walking to get something to eat afterward, on foot down a road at night, the way kids do when they think they've got the whole evening ahead of them. They didn't know they'd already been picked out. Prosecutors say two sixteen year olds, Thomas Stein and a friend named Christopher Horn, had spent that night cruising parking lots in an suv that Stein's mother had rented, trying car doors, looking for something to steal, and at some point they stopped looking at cars and started looking at people. Three girls walking alone in the dark. Prosecutors say Stein drove past them, flashed his high beams into their faces, and then stopped the vehicle so they could rob them. And in the middle of that robbery, a gun went off at close range.

4:01 The bullet hit Kayla in the chest. Steininhorn took off. Kayla's two friends stayed and tried to save her life. A Cape Coral police officer got there within minutes and tried too, And here's the detail that stays with you. When that officer reached her, Kayla was still conscious, and she told him she didn't know the person who shot her. She had no idea she was a stranger to the people who decided she was a target. She died a short time later at the hospital. The Cape Coral Police department worked the case and identified both teenagers. Prosecutors moved the case out of juvenile court and into adult court, and a grand jury indicted both sixteen year olds for first degree felony murder. Now, felony murder is a specific thing, and it matters here, so let me be honest with you about it. Under felony murder, if someone dies during a violent felony you're committing, like an armed robbery, you can be convicted of murder whether or not you personally pulled the trigger. That's the law, and that's what the jury of applied, and that trigger question is genuinely disputed.

5:04 Stein's co defendant, Christopher Horn, took a plea deal, pleaded guilty to second degree murder and attempted robbery, got twenty five years, and agreed to testify against Stein. Horn and another witness told the court that it was Stein who fired the shot. Stein has always said otherwise. He took the stand at his own trial and said he was there, but that someone else pulled the trigger, that his role was driving and fleeing. The jury didn't buy his version. In May, they convicted him, and because of how felony murder works, even his own account, the one where he isn't the shooter, still leaves him legally responsible for Kayla's death, which brings us to Friday and the sentencing. And before we get to the man who wanted a hug, we listened to the girls who lived. Emma Wright was walking with Kayla that night and she told the court that in the aftermath she got buld, blamed, discouraged, as if surviving were something to answer for. And Luene de Jay, the third girl, said something I haven't been able to shake.

6:09 She said, she feels like she's trapped in a coma. She can't wake up from suffocating, but somehow still expected to keep living. That's what this took from the people it didn't kill. Prosecutors asked Judge Nick Thompson for the maximum life in prison. They told the court Stein was the driver, that he'd armed the group, that he was the one who spotted the targets, that he had a prior record for breaking into cars, that he was, in their words, the bad influence. The defense asked for twenty five years, the same number Horn got, and Stein testified. He apologized. He said the decision to get behind the wheel that night was a total act of selfishness, that he's ashamed of it every day. He said he didn't know a robbery was going to happen, but that it doesn't change the result, doesn't change the fact that a life was taken. And then at the very end he made his ask, not for a specific sentence, He asked the judge if before he walked out of that courtroom he could give his family a hug, and Judge Thompson said no, immediately. You can say goodbye, but you can't have any physical contact. Then he sided with the prosecution life in prison for Kayla's murder, and on top of that, fifteen years on each of three separate counts, stacked one after another, another forty five years. Because Stein was sixteen, the law guarantees him a review of the life sentence after fifteen years. His attorney stood up and pointed out that even if some future court decides Stein has been rehabilitated,

7:40 he'll still have forty five more years to serve. And the judge said he'd thought about it and he was leaving it exactly as ordered. So here's the honest part. There's a real conversation to have about sentencing a sixteen year old to what is functionally the rest of his life. Kids' brains aren't finished. The law recognizes that, which is why he gets that review at all. Reasonable people can argue about whether life plus forty five for someone who was sixteen and says he wasn't the shooter is justice or whether it's just math designed to make sure a review never means anything. I'm not gonna pretend that's a simple question, because it isn't. But I keep coming back to the hug, because a hug is a small mercy, a moment of human comfort before something hard. And the reason we were all in that room is that Kayla Rinkin Miller doesn't get any more of those, not one.

8:32 Her mother doesn't get to hug or goodbye. Kayla told a police officer with a bullet in her chest that she didn't even know the person who did this to her. So when I hear that the hardest moment of Thomas Stein's day was being told no, I think about the goodbye Kayla never got to say to anybody. That's not the judge being cruel. That's just the shape of what was lost. Our second story is one of the most closely watched murder cases in the country right now and this week it turned into a fight over a phone. But before we get to the phone, you need to know the man at the center of it, because it's easy to lose him in all the legal maneuvering. Jared Bridgin was thirty three years old. He was a design manager at Microsoft, a father of four. On the evening of February sixteenth, twenty twenty two, he did something completely routine.

9:30 He dropped his two older children, twins he shared with his ex wife, off at her home in Jacksonville Beach, Florida after dinner, and then he started driving home to Saint Augustine with his two year old daughter, Bexley, buckled into the back seat. On a one way street, he came up on a tire lying in the road blocking his way, and Jared did what almost anyone would do. He stopped and he got out to move it. Police say that tire was placed there on purpose to make him stop, and when he stepped out of that vehicle, he was shot and killed. Bexley, two years old, was in the car. She saw it. Bullets struck the suv close to where she was strapped in. She was not physically hurt. Take a second with that her father was ambushed and killed in front of her over what prosecutors describe as a plot, and she was two. Here is who is charged, and here is the part where I need you to hold the line with me on the presumption of innocence because it matters. Prosecutors say this was a murder for hire. They've charged three people, SHAWNA Gardner, Jared's ex wife now thirty nine, Mario Fernandez Saldana, Gardner's current husband, thirty eight, and Henry Tennan sixty five, the man they allege was the gunman, the one they say planted that tire and pulled the trigger. All three have pleaded not guilty. Every one of them is presumed innocent, and nothing I'm about to describe changes that. The ten piece is important and it's a moving target, so let

11:02 me be careful with it. Back in twenty twenty three, Henry Tennant pleaded guilty to second degree murder, admitted he was the trigger man, and agreed to testify against Gardner and Fernandez Saldana as part of a deal. Then, earlier this year, he changed his mind. He withdrew that guilty plea he recanted called his earlier statements false pleaded not guilty to everything and said he will not testify. His own trial isn't scheduled until twenty twenty seven, so the man who once confessed is now denying all of it, and a jury may never hear a word of that old confession against the people he once pointed to. Prosecutors also announced last November that they're no longer seeking the death penalty against Gardner and Fernandez Saldana, a decision made with the support of Bright against family. The trials are close now. Fernandez Saldana goes first, with jury selections set to begin August tenth. Gardner's trial follows right after, with her jury selection at the end of August. And that's the backdrop for what happened in court on Monday, because Gardner's defense has turned its attention to Kirsten Bridgen. Kirston is Jared's widow. She's Bexley's mother. She was the one building a life with him when he was killed, and under Florida law, she is classified as a victim in this case, which gives her certain privacy protections. In June, Gardner's team won a fight to make Kirsten sit for a second deposition, a second round of sworn questioning after her first one ran five and a half hours, not counting the lunch break. Her own attorney described what that

12:34 first deposition was like. Questions about hotel rooms, the layouts of vacation rentals, who wore which bathing suit at the pool, questions about her faith, about whether she was a good enough member of her church. She sat there and answered questions about her husband being murdered. She relived all of it. And now off the back of that second deposition, the defense wants her phone. They say. The deposition revealed that Kirsten has been in ongoing contact with other witnesses, that she's exchanged thousands of messages with three of them in the month since Jared's death. Two of those witnesses, the prosecution points out, are Gardner's own children, whose phones have already been downloaded and handed over. The third is a witness who allegedly told the defense's private investigator that she wouldn't answer his questions without first getting permission from Kirsten because she was supporting Kirsten. Now, I want to be fair here because the defense has a real job to do and a real argument. Gardner's attorneys say they have a constitutional right to prepare a defense to test the witnesses against their client, and that if the widow is coordinating with other witnesses, they're entitled to know about it.

13:41 That's not nothing. A defendant facing the possibility of life in prison is supposed to be able to challenge the evidence. That's how the system is meant to work. And I'm not going to sneer at it. But here's what the prosecution said, and here's where I'll admit my sympathies sit. Assistant State Attorney Stephen Siegel called it a phishing expedition. He pointed out the timing that the defence's investigator showed up at a witness's home on July third, a state holiday, the day before the fourth of July, two years after that witness was first deposed, at a moment when there had never been any suggestion of witness tampering. And Kirsten's own attorney put it plainly, he said, they just want to get onto her phone, to get as much as they can, to pick at her, to beat her up on the stand, to do anything they possibly can. And look, I'm gonna be honest with you. I understand the defense is right. I do, But there's a person underneath all of this, a woman whose husband was ambushed and shot to death while their toddler watched from the back seat.

14:42 She has already sat for hours reliving the worst day of her life, fielding questions about swimsuits and her religious devotion, and now the fight is over her private messages. Whatever the jury eventually decides about guilt, and that is entirely for them to decide. The toll this process takes on the people left behind is real, and it's worth saying out loud. Nobody should have to bury a husband and then be treated like the problem. Our last story this morning is a strange one, and I'll tell you up front that almost everything in it comes from one side, from a civil complaint and a brand new indictment. So we're going to hold it at arm's length and let it stay in allegation, because that's exactly what it is right now. The place is Gloucester, Massachusetts. The woman charged is named Phyllis Palazzola. This week, a grand jury handed down an indictment charging her with attempted murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and intimidating a witness. She's also facing a civil lawsuit from the woman making these claims.

15:53 Palazzola is scheduled to be arraigned on July twenty first, and she has not entered a plea to any of this umption of innocence all the way through. According to the complaint, this started, like a lot of these do, with money. Back in twenty twenty one, the woman says Palazzola was facing insurance fraud charges of her own and asked her a longtime friend for help paying to defend herself, and the friend said yes. She says she wrote Palazzola a check for fifteen thousand dollars, then another for twenty five thousand, and then in February of twenty twenty two, a third check for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

16:35 Add that up and it's one hundred and eighty thousand dollars And it wasn't a handshake. The complaint says. Both women signed a promissory note, a real document, that said Palazzolo would pay the whole one hundred and eighty thousand back by July twelfth, twenty twenty two, and that if she didn't, the friend could put a lien on Palazzola's home. The complaint says Palazzola never paid back a dime and that the friend kept asking and asking, And then, the complaint says, on January third, twenty twenty four, Palozzola reached out and suggested they meet, supposedly to go to a bank together and finally withdraw the money she owed. So the friend got in Palozzola's car, but according to the complaint, they never went to any bank. Palozzola allegedly drove to her own home, and there the complaint says, she took a rag soaked in w D forty, held it against the friend's face, and tried to knock her unconscious. The friend says she got away, ran back to her own car, but couldn't stop Palazzola from getting in with her. And here's the part that turns a bizarre story into a chilling one. The friend, fearing for her life, started recording on her phone fourteen minutes of it, and in that recording, according to the complaint, Palazzola admitted what the plan had been, to sedate her with the WD forty and then to drive them both off a bridge so that two people would die and it would look like an accident. I

18:06 was going to kill us both. The complaint quotes her as saying I figured I'd drive off and it would look like an accident that we both died. Now, I want to be careful and clear eyed here, because it's easy to treat a case like this as a punchline. WD forty is a lubricant, it is not a sedative. As a plan to render someone unconscious, it is mercifully a bad one. But I'd ask you not to file this under funny because the incompetence of a plan doesn't tell you anything about the intent behind it. If the allegations are true, this was somebody who, according to her own recorded words, would rather kill two people and stage it as an accident than repay a debt to the friend who bailed her out. That's not a comedy. That's a decision, and it's exactly the kind of decision a courtroom exists to sort out, which is where this one is headed on the twenty first, So that's your Tuesday.

18:58 Three cases and three names I want to leave you with because they're the ones who matter. Kayla Rink and Miller, fifteen years old, who was a stranger to the people who decided she was a target and who never got to say goodbye to anyone. Jared Bright again thirty three, ambushed on a quiet road with his two year old daughter in the back seat, whose widow is still four years later being put through it. And a woman in Gloucester who says the friend she loaned one hundred and eighty thousand dollars tried to end both their lives rather than pay her back. If this episode gave you something to think about, do me a favor and share it. Send it to one person who follows these cases. The way you do word of mouth is genuinely how this show finds the people. It's four and I want to hear from you on this one because it's a real question.

19:47 If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me a sixteen year old guaranteed a sentence review after fifteen years and then handed forty five more on top of it. Is that justice or is it math designed so the review or means anything. I genuinely want to know where you land. If you're watching on YouTube or listening anywhere else, jump in there too. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily crime and justice. Look out for the people around you, tell the truth, even when it costs you something. And if you're the kind of person who'd rather hurt someone than make it right, well do better. Disclaimer and sourcing, The following is spoken for the record. Everyone charged in these cases is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. In the Cape Coral case, Thomas Stein was convicted at trial of first degree felony murder in the death of Kayla Ringcone Miller and sentenced on July tenth to life in prison with three additional consecutive fifteen year terms. Reporting on the three additional counts has varied, with most outlets and Court TV's own sentencing account describing them as attempted robbery with a firearm. We have used that description because Stein was sixteen at the time of the crime. His life sentence carries a guaranteed review after fifteen years. Whether Stein personally fired the fatal shot is disputed. His co defendant and a witness testified that he did, While Stein maintains he did not. Under Florida's felony murder law, a conviction does

21:18 not require that he was the shooter in the Jacksonville case, SHAWNA. Gardner, Mario Fernandez Saldana, and Henry Tennan have all pleaded not guilty. The murder for higher characterization is the prosecution's theory and has not been proven. Henry Tennan initially pleaded guilty and agreed to testify, then withdrew that plea, recanted his earlier statements and now denies involvement. His trial is not expected until twenty twenty seven. Trial dates and rulings described here are current as of this recording and are subject to change. In the Glocester case, the allegations against Phyllis Palazzola come from a civil complaint and a grand jury indictment. They are unproven accusations, and the account of events is the alleged victims. Palitzola has not entered a plea and is scheduled for arraignment on July twenty first. The quoted statements attributed to her are as described in the complaint. This episode describes as stated plan of murder and suicide. If you are someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a mental health professional or in the United States, call or text the nine to eight to eight suicide and crisis lifeline. Reporting in this episode is based primarily on Court TV, corroborated with Wink News, the Cape Coral Breeze News for Jacks, First Coast News, The Florida Times Union, and other outlets. Daily Crime and Justice is a production of Calaroga Shark Media. Nothing in this program is legal advice.