Bexley Bridegan was two years old on February 16th, 2022.
She was in the backseat when her father stopped the car. She was in the backseat when he was shot. She was there — present, strapped in, two years old — for the last moments of Jared Bridegan’s life. And then she was the first thing Kirsten Bridegan saw when the 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 — to suspects, to charges, to the legal proceedings. And I understand why. There’s a lot to cover. But I think we do something wrong when we move past it too quickly. Because Bexley Bridegan being in that car is not a side detail in this 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. Bexley, who was in the backseat. And the twins — Jared’s daughters with Shanna Gardner — who 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 own childhood in the middle of something like this — not this extreme, but something that rhymes with it. Because there are a lot of you. And this experience almost never gets talked about honestly.
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. When it was settled, full guardianship was granted to Shanna Gardner’s parents — her mother and father, in Washington state. The Bridegan family was given visitation rights.
The children went to live with the family of the woman 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.
That’s the world these kids are growing up in. And that fact deserves more than a passing mention.
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 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, at picking up on emotional weather. You learn which names don’t get said in which house. You learn which questions land wrong. You develop a sense — finely 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 and which parts need 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 they would never recognize because they can’t see what you look like in the other house.
From the outside, this child looks resilient. Adaptable. Handling it well.
They are not handling it. They are fragmenting. Quietly, invisibly, 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. Parentification. And it doesn’t mean what most people think it means when they first hear it.
It doesn’t mean a 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.
And 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 something as small and ordinary as the way a parent’s face changes when a certain name comes up — and the child, who has 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.
That child is working. In a way no child should have to work. They are doing emotional labor for an adult before they have ever had the 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 hyperaware of everyone else’s feelings in every room they enter. Who struggles to identify their own needs because they spent so many years focused on someone else’s. Who is exhausted in a way they can’t quite explain because they have 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.
If any of that lands for you — 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 had a name, and it cost you something.
In the Bridegan case, the twins were navigating some version of this for years. Moving between two households that were in open, sustained conflict. Carrying 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 grew up, allegedly, in the household of the people who arranged their biological father’s murder. They had breakfast with those people. 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 them. They will be working through what it means — quietly, across decades, in 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 live with Shanna Gardner’s parents in Washington state, on visitation terms with the Bridegan family. Again — not because of cruelty or oversight. Because those were the legal options available. But the result is children being raised by the family of the woman accused of killing their father.
The system, working exactly as designed.
Bexley’s situation is its own specific thing, and 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 is 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 experience of overwhelming fear, of catastrophic loss, of a world that has revealed itself as suddenly and completely unsafe — and it carries those recordings not as memories you can describe, but as responses. Hypervigilance. Disrupted attachment. A baseline sense that the world is a place where terrible things can arrive without warning and without explanation.
Bexley Bridegan is growing up. She will reach an age where she can read. Where 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 has fought for her ferociously since the night Jared was killed. That is not nothing. That is everything, in a situation with very few things to hold onto. But it doesn’t change what she carries into the day she fully understands.
Let me close this episode with the structural 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 has stopped mentioning the other parent’s name at dinner because they learned what happens to the room when they do. It was not built to identify the kid who has been managing a parent’s 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 it processed — had no way to ask the one question that mattered most: what is actually happening to these kids right now, inside this thing we keep adjudicating?
That’s not an individual failure. It’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 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 who never had a vote.
Next episode: The woman who came home to a knock at the door — and what she understood about survival that most people only learn too late.
This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
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