Before her tragic death, a mother from Texas instructed her 3-year-old son to bid farewell to his father on camera. Shortly after, she fatally shot the child in a ditch before taking her own life, a day before her scheduled custody hearing with her ex-husband. Savannah Kriger, 32, and her son Kaiden were discovered deceased with gunshot wounds to their heads in a San Antonio park on March 19.
Law enforcement authorities have spent considerable time reconstructing the events leading up to the murder-suicide. Prior to the incident, Kriger exhibited disturbing behavior, including shooting at her wedding photos, vandalizing her ex-husband’s residence, and sending him provocative FaceTime videos and texts. The tragic sequence of events began when Kriger left her job on March 18 and proceeded to her ex-husband’s home, where she caused damage to his belongings.
Following this, she returned to her own residence, where law enforcement later found her wedding dress and portraits laid out on the bed, with evidence suggesting that she had fired shots at the portraits. Sheriff Javier Salazar remarked on the unsettling nature of the case, highlighting the emotional turmoil and disturbing actions that preceded the tragic outcome.
Kriger subsequently picked her son up from daycare and then started inundating Kaiden’s father with the harrowing messages, authorities said.
“You don’t have anything to go home to now. You really don’t,” Kriger said on one FaceTime call. “
You won’t have anything at all at the end of the day.”
The final text to her ex read, “Say goodbye to your son.”
A 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 discovered.
In the clip, authorities said the mom told her son to “say goodbye to Daddy” before she apologized to the boy that his father wasn’t there and then kissed him.
Her phone records show she then looked up videos of children’s cartoons on her phone while they were still sitting in the ditch, according to authorities.
Kriger had filed for a divorce and a temporary restraining order against her ex on March 7, MySA reported.
The former couple were due in court on March 19 — the day the bodies were discovered — for a custody hearing.