A bereaved Texas father, whose wife shot their 3-year-old, then herself amid a bitter custody battle after sending a text saying “say goodbye to your son,” said that the family court system failed the toddler.
The bodies of Savannah Kriger, 32, and 3-year-old Kaiden were found in a drainage ditch with gunshot wounds to their heads at San Antonio’s Tom Slick Park on March 19, according to the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.
At 3:19 p.m. that day, 19 hours before they were found, Savannah sent a chilling text to her husband, who had filed for divorce on March 7, according to court records.
“Say goodbye to your son,” she wrote, per screenshots provided to Fox News Digital by father Brian Kriger.
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“She sent the message on the tail end of a wire transferring all the money out of [our] joint account,” Kriger said on Friday. “I assumed she was running with him – that’s what prompted my lawyer to initiate the order for writ to make her appear in court the next day.”
About two hours earlier, per a timeline based on GPS records released by the department, the mother let herself into her Kriger’s house and destroyed property inside. Meanwhile, the department said, phone tracking showed that the unwitting father was still at work.
An hour later, after surveillance footage showed Savannah picking the 3-year-old up from daycare, she called Kriger via FaceTime call he recorded and later shared with police.
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“You don’t have anything to go home to now, you really don’t,” she said. “You won’t have anything at all at the end of the day.”
“You left us for a piece of a–… Daddy left us for some woman he met on the internet… explain to your son why you’re not here,” she said, the toddler in the back seat.
When he asked why she vandalized objects in his home, Savannah replied that he “cared more about [his] material possessions than his son.”
Kriger called police and raced home to find that “every article of clothing” he owned had been cut, he said. Officers arrived at the home at 3:37 p.m.
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“What was going through my head was that I needed to get my son out of her custody as quickly as possible because of her erratic behavior after seeing the damages,” Kriger told Fox News Digital. “The only thing that [the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office] did was a welfare check to her residence, which was stupid because I told them that she wasn’t there, and she had my son and intentions to take everything from me.”
Officers called a relative to let them into the Dover Den home, where their findings “made them pause,” Sheriff Javier Salazar said at a press conference.
Savannah had laid out wedding dresses and wedding portraits displayed on the bed pierced by two gunshots. A shell casing found in the house matched shell casings later found near the mother and son’s bodies in the park, the department said.
The next morning, an Amber Alert was issued for the toddler, but by that time, based on phone records, the department believed the woman and child were already dead.
After an unsuccessful attempt to FaceTime her husband, a 21-second video found on Savannah’s phone, recorded at 3:21 p.m., appears to show the woman and child in the drainage ditch. She instructs the child to “say goodbye to [his] daddy,” which he does, per the department. She kisses the child and apologizes that his father “can’t be there with [him].”
Savannah’s phone records show that she looked up children’s cartoons at 3:29 p.m. – the department has inferred that these were the child’s final moments, Fox San Antonio reported.
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Investigators found Savannah’s abandoned white 2023 Lincoln Aviator at the park off State Highway 151 East, but they did not find their bodies until the next day.
The Bexar County Medical Examiner ruled the child’s death a homicide on Friday, KENS5 reported.
Kriger told Fox News Digital that his son was a “sweet and loving person” who “lit up the room whenever he was around.”
“He had so many friends and family that loved and adored him and I miss him so much,” he said. “I thought he was so funny and he was so smart for his age. He was going to be something special, he had so much life ahead of him.”
Savannah had a restraining order against her husband at the time of the murder-suicide, per Bexar County Court records. The couple were scheduled to meet in family court days afterward.
“There definitely needs to be more consideration for fathers in the family court system,” Kriger told Fox News Digital. “Instead of always taking the mother’s side and believing everything they say.”
“Obviously she had a motive to all her false police reports and allegations of domestic violence to take my son away from me, which proved to be successful because the court system is biased to mothers. But obviously, mothers are capable of doing the worst possible thing to get back at the fathers, which is not fair.”
The father has not been criminally charged, the sheriff’s office and local police department told Fox News Digital. However, the last time Kriger saw his son, he said, was on March 7, after Savannah claimed he threatened her life in family court after he filed for divorce.
“We exchanged at the police station,” Kriger said. “The last time my son saw me [in person was] while I was crying that I didn’t want to give him up.”
Kriger said that Savannah “hid her mental health problems from everyone, including her closest family members, for years.”
“She never sought help for her trauma and never showed signs that there was anything wrong until it was too late,” Kriger claimed.
The bereaved father also claims that the judge overseeing their custody dispute was aware that she “had thoughts about suicide two times prior to [his] filing for divorce.”
“The justice system failed my son,” Kriger said. “I do feel like the judge who ordered me to surrender Kaiden did not have his safety in mind.”
Fox News Digital could not reach the attorney representing Savannah in her custody dispute at press time.
“We will never know the complete picture,” Marta Prada Pelaez, the CEO of Family Violence Prevention Services, told KENS5. “We only know of the level of despair that this mother must have had… The community’s attention should now go to those members of the family who are left with no real answers.”
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