Mary Catherine Gingles saw it coming.
For over a year, she had warned Broward County judges that the husband she was divorcing was going to kill her, obtaining two domestic violence injunctions that, in the end, could not shield her from bullets.
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WATCH HEREEarly Sunday morning, police say 43-year-old Nathan “Bo” Gingles went to the Tamarac home where Mary Catherine, 34, and their 4-year-old daughter, Seraphine, lived, in violation of that latest injunction.
There, he shot and killed his father-in-law, 64-year-old David Ponzer, and then hunted down Mary Catherine as she banged on neighbors’ doors frantically seeking help, the sheriff’s office said.
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He finally did what she said he was going to do inside one of those homes, shooting and killing her and the man who answered the door, 36-year-old Andrew Ferrin, and let her in to see what the problem was.
The problem, police say, was Nathan Gingles, who snatched up Seraphine and fled to a Walmart parking lot in North Lauderdale, where he was arrested and Seraphine was recovered safely.
Ex-military, owner – his wife claimed – of 20 firearms, including assault rifles with suppressors, Gingles wasn’t so loud and proud in family court Monday.
Appearing in handcuffs and shackles, wearing maximum security inmate clothing, Broward Circuit Judge Hope Tieman Bristol had to admonish him to speak up when he announced himself: “Nathan Gingles,” which he pronounced “JING-ulz,” before adding his biological role: “father.”
To be determined: whether that father will ever see his daughter again.
“Mr. Gingles has no contact” with Seraphine, Bristol ordered. “That means through no third party, social media, relative, friend -- no contact with the child. You understand sir?”
“I do, your honor,” Gingles replied.
The fate of their now-motherless daughter lies in the courts, after Seraphine was placed in a foster shelter home.
The alleged killer asked that a cousin of his be allowed to take care of the child, but the judge put off any such decision until DCF and the girl’s legal advocates can investigate that and other options and, if appropriate, recommend a change in placement for the child.
There was no mention of any surviving relative on the mother’s side of the family, with her father also killed.
According to court records, the couple met in 2016 and married two years later, moving to Germany, where Seraphine was born in August 2020. They returned to the States in 2023 and rented the house in Tamarac.
It was last February, after Ponzer traveled to Florida to be with his daughter, that she finally summoned the courage and found the opportunity to take action against the violent, drug-using, controlling, abusive husband she would describe in court papers.
She obtained a domestic violence injunction against him in February 2024 and filed for divorce 11 days later.
She reported then that he was recently “up all night snorting Adderall and was in a drug-induced state acting bizarre in the morning,” singing “a made-up song about how he was going to kill the mother and get away with it and how no one would find her body.”
“I live in constant fear of my husband,” she stated in the petition for injunction. “He will snort Adderall and stay up all night while Sera and I try to sleep. He has left lines of crushed Adderall on his dresser” before heading to work as an IT technician, earning $187,000 a year with a military contractor serving the Southern Command in Doral.
“If you try to leave me, I will kill you,” he told her “more than once,” she swore in court records.
“Because of Nathan’s psychotic behavior, his multiple threats, his drug use, his multiple/many silenced firearms and my impending divorce actions, I am afraid Nathan will kill me and my daughter,” she wrote in the petition for injunction.
She said he owned 20 firearms, some “serious weaponry, many of which also have silencers,” including assault-style rifles and a shotgun.
She dropped the first injunction in July after her husband agreed to a “no harmful conduct” order. At some point, she said, his weapons were seized by the Broward Sheriff’s Office, though she wrote she was unsure whether they were returned to him. A request for information from BSO on the status of that seizure has not been answered.
But by the fall, in seeking a second injunction in December, she wrote his “stalking behaviors have increased recently and I think he is aiming to kill me while he has access to the rental property where I reside.”
In October, she said she discovered a tracking device on her car, one identical to one her husband had purchased weeks earlier – something she reported to the Broward Sheriff’s Office, which did not follow up, she said. An email to BSO seeking the report and any follow-up has not been answered.
In late December, she reported to the sheriff finding stashed in her garage elements of what could be a murder kit: plastic gloves, plastic wrap, zip-tie restraints, crushed white powder, shoe and hair coverings and a note: “air embolism, psych medications, waterboarding.” She noted he had access to syringes for injecting testosterone.
“I think it is imminent that he will attempt to murder me,” she wrote, in obtaining the second injunction in December, which was extended to March 19.
But injunctions can only do so much, and police say Gingles somehow obtained a gun and used it during his killing spree Sunday.
Monday, Judge Bristol added one last provision to her order: grief counseling, for a four-year-old girl who will never see her mother or grandfather again.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by calling 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), visiting www.thehotline.org or texting LOVEIS to 22522.
