A Texas mom told her 3-year-old son to “say goodbye to daddy” on camera just moments before she shot him in a ditch and then turned the gun on herself — a day before she was due in court for a custody hearing with her ex-husband, cops said.
Savannah Kriger, 32, and her son Kaiden were found dead with gunshot wounds to their heads at a San Antonio park back on March 19, but authorities have spent weeks piecing together their harrowing final hours as they probed the murder-suicide.
In the hours before the slayings, authorities determined Kriger shot bullets at her old wedding photos, trashed her ex-husband’s home and taunted him with a slew of FaceTime videos and texts warning him, “You won’t have anything at all by the end of the day.”
The grim ordeal started to unfold when Kriger left work the afternoon of March 18 and head straight to her ex’s home while he was at work, the Bexar County Sheriff’s office said.
After damaging the ex’s furniture and some personal items, the mother drove to her own home where cops later found her wedding dress and portraits laid out on the bed.
“We believe that she fired two shots into her wedding portraits,” Sheriff Javier Salazar said.
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 inside 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 cell while they were still sitting in the ditch, according to authorities.
Although the video didn’t capture the fatal shootings,Kriger’s intentions were “pretty clear,” the sheriff said.
Their bodies were discovered some 19 hours later after an Amber Alert was issued and authorities scoured the area.
The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office quickly determined the cause of deaths as murder-suicide.
Authorities, at the time, had also revealed the little boy was at the center of a custody battle.
Kriger had filed for a divorce and a temporary restraining order against her 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.
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.