Sheriff Javier Salazar’s Phone Timeline Shows Savannah Kriger Told 3-Year-Old Kaiden to Say Goodbye in a Tom Slick Park Ditch

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar spent May 1, 2024, walking reporters through a phone, a car, and a drainage ditch. Savannah Samantha Kriger, 32, and her son Kaiden, 3, were found the morning of March 19 in a drainage easement behind Tom Slick Park on San Antonio’s West Side. The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Kaiden’s death a homicide and Savannah’s a suicide. Each died of a gunshot wound to the head. Investigators said she shot her son and then herself. A gun was found nearby. No living defendant remained, which is how a murder-suicide file closes even when the questions do not.

Salazar’s clock starts on the afternoon of March 18, not with a stranger. At 12:49 p.m. Savannah left work in a 2023 Lincoln Aviator and drove to the southeast San Antonio home of her husband, Brian Kriger, who was at work. She arrived about 1:15 p.m. and damaged clothes and other belongings. GPS and a later criminal-mischief report are what put her there. She picked Kaiden up early from daycare. Surveillance showed the pickup. Relatives said it was the last time the pair were seen alive by the people who knew them. At the Dover Den house where she had been living, deputies who got inside with a relative’s help found wedding dresses laid out and wedding portraits on a bed, shot through. Salazar said the scene made officers pause.

Nineteen Hours of a Phone

The Aviator reached Tom Slick Park about 3:03 p.m. At roughly the same minute, Brian Kriger was calling San Antonio police about the damage at his house. At 3:19 p.m. a FaceTime to him failed, and a text landed: “Say goodbye to your son.” Fox News Digital quoted him saying the message arrived at the tail end of a transfer that emptied a joint account. A call that ran a little over two minutes carried, by the sheriff’s reconstruction and the father’s account, a line about having nothing to go home to and nothing left by the end of the day. At 3:21 p.m. she recorded roughly 21 seconds. She and Kaiden are seated in the ditch where the bodies were found. She tells him to say bye to Daddy. He does. She apologizes that his father is not there and kisses him. The clip does not show the shootings. Salazar said there was nothing graphic in it except the knowledge of what followed. At 3:29 p.m. the phone looked up children’s cartoons. Officers were at Brian’s house by about 3:37 p.m. A welfare check went to a residence she was no longer in. Location services did not lead anyone to the park in time. The car was found in the lot. The bodies waited until morning. An Amber Alert went out for a child who, phone records suggested, was already dead.

Court paper makes a single villain too easy, and a single victim too easy. The San Antonio Express-News reported that Savannah had applied for a protective order describing a shove on January 7 while the couple prepared to go to a shooting range, and a March 7 threat she said was made with a switchblade during an argument in her vehicle about custody. Fox News Digital, citing court records and Brian Kriger, reported that he filed for divorce on March 7, that a temporary order kept him from seeing Kaiden in person while still allowing calls, and that she had a restraining order against him. A protective-order affidavit is an allegation, not a finding. His later claim that the allegations were false is also an allegation. No jury weighed them. The sheriff’s office and police told Fox he was not criminally charged. He told Fox the last time he saw his son was March 7, and that after he saw the damaged house he wanted Kaiden out of her custody because of what he called erratic behavior. “The justice system failed my son,” he said. He blamed a judge who ordered him to surrender the boy, and he blamed a welfare check he said he had already told deputies would find an empty house.

A Family That Does Not Accept the Shape of the File

Stepsister Jamie Johnson told KENS 5 she had spoken with Savannah the Sunday before the deaths, about summer parties and about shielding Kaiden from the separation. “I’m not saying that that’s not correct, but none of us feel that’s how it happened,” Johnson said of the murder-suicide account. She said the family harbored no ill will toward the husband, and that Savannah had people to call. A vigil at the park drew friends who described a devoted mother. Those sentences sit in the record next to the medical examiner, not instead of it. Grief is allowed to reject a ruling. The ruling is what the autopsy signed: homicide for the child, suicide for the mother. KENS 5 reported the suicide ruling when it landed. By September 10, 2026, a volunteer memorial project marked what it said would have been Kaiden’s sixth birthday. The AEGIS Alliance is not treating a memorial post as a birth certificate. It is noting that people outside the courthouse were still saying his name two and a half years later.

Family court in Texas runs on competing affidavits and temporary orders that move a child before a final hearing. A custody setting had been on the calendar. Kaiden was supposed to be in a courtroom, not a concrete channel off Highway 151. Separation is one of the most dangerous windows in a violent household, and it is also the window in which a parent in crisis can decide a child will not be “lost” to the other parent. Both facts can live in one jacket. They lived in this one. Her petition described fear. His account described a transfer of money, a wrecked house, and a text. The ditch is where the jacket stopped being a lawsuit.

Advocates who work those dockets will recognize the ordinary steps. She left work early. She damaged a house that was no longer a shared evening. She staged a wedding and shot the portraits. She lied, or at least gave a reason, for an early daycare pickup. She turned a phone into a goodbye the boy did not understand, then used the same phone to find cartoons. None of that required a stranger. It required a collapsing marriage, a firearm, and a welfare check aimed at the wrong door. Brian Kriger’s complaint about fathers in family court is a policy argument he is entitled to make. It is not a finding that her January and March allegations were invented, and her allegations are not a finding that he was the person who fired. The medical examiner named the shooter by ruling her death a suicide and his a homicide.

What a Closed File Still Owes a Three-Year-Old

Public reporting after the spring of 2024 did not produce a criminal trial because the person investigators identified as the shooter was dead. Murder-suicide files freeze everyone else in a story they do not get to finish in front of a jury. The father received a text, a police report about broken belongings, an Amber Alert, and a notification from a park. The stepsister received a Sunday conversation about parties that never happened. Deputies received a ditch. There is no cross-examination of the protective-order claims against the shot portraits. There is a 21-second clip that should not have been recorded, and a three-year-old who was told to say goodbye to a father who was not in the frame.

The AEGIS Alliance records cases in which a child becomes the last leverage in a collapsing house. See the Crime News file, a teenager who installed cameras to prove abuse, the Mason grandmother sentenced after scalding a toddler, and the U.S. News desk. A phone video is not a substitute for a welfare system that reaches the ditch before daylight.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. The line is free, confidential, and available at all hours. If a child is in immediate danger, call 911.

Tom Slick Park is a West Side green space off a highway, a parcel where a city puts recreation and drainage in the same fence line. The ditch is not a metaphor. It is the channel where two bodies waited for a park officer and an 11 a.m. announcement that the Amber Alert was over. Kaiden was three. Family court, daycare pickup, a mischief report, and a welfare check all touched the file. None of them reached him in the hour after 3:21 p.m. The AEGIS Alliance is leaving that hour in the record.