A tragic incident unfolded in Texas when a mother instructed her 3-year-old son to bid his father farewell on camera, moments before she fatally shot the child and then herself. The incident occurred a day prior to a scheduled court hearing for a custody dispute with her former spouse, according to law enforcement officials.
The bodies of Savannah Kriger, 32, and her son Kaiden were discovered in a San Antonio park on March 19, both with gunshot wounds to their heads. The authorities have been meticulously reconstructing the chilling final hours of the mother and son as they investigated the murder-suicide.
In the lead-up to the tragic event, Kriger reportedly fired at her old wedding photos, vandalized her ex-husband’s residence, and sent him a series of disturbing FaceTime videos and text messages, warning him that he would be left with nothing by the end of the day.
The horrifying sequence of events began to unravel when Kriger left her job on the afternoon of March 18 and went directly to her ex-husband’s house while he was at work, as per the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office. After causing damage to his furniture and personal belongings, she returned to her own residence. Police later discovered her wedding dress and portraits spread out on her bed.
“We believe that she fired two shots into her wedding portraits,” stated Sheriff Javier Salazar. Kriger then collected her son from daycare and began bombarding Kaiden’s father with distressing messages.
In one of the FaceTime calls, Kriger told her ex-husband, “You don’t have anything to go home to now. You really don’t. You won’t have anything at all at the end of the day.” Her final text to him read, “Say goodbye to your son.”
A chilling 21-second video recovered from her phone showed Kriger and her son sitting in the ditch in the park where their bodies would later be found. In the video, she instructed her son to bid his father goodbye, apologized for his father’s absence, and then kissed him. Her phone records revealed that she subsequently searched for children’s cartoons while they were still in the ditch.
Although the video did not capture the fatal shootings, the sheriff stated that Kriger’s intentions were “pretty clear.” Their bodies were discovered approximately 19 hours later, following an Amber Alert and a thorough search of the area by authorities. The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office promptly classified the deaths as a murder-suicide.
It was also revealed that the young boy was at the center of a custody dispute. Kriger had filed for divorce and a temporary restraining order against her ex-husband on March 7. The former couple was due in court for a custody hearing on March 19, the day the bodies were discovered.