People walk past portraits of the victims of a triple homicide inside the Plum Bay community during a candle vigil on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025, in Tamarac, Florida. (D.A. Varela/Miami Herald/TNS)
(TNS) The Army veteran accused in the chilling murder of his wife, her father and a neighbor — as the couple’s 4-year-old daughter watched — made a brief appearance in court Friday morning and pleaded not guilty.
Nathan Gingles, 43, dressed in gray-striped prison garb, didn’t utter a word during the hearing at the Broward County Criminal Courthouse. When asked during the arraignment how he would plead, Gingles’ attorney Kaitlin Gonzalez said not guilty before Broward County Circuit Court Judge Marina Garcia-Wood. The suspected gunman was then escorted back to the Broward County Jail.
His next appearance in court is scheduled for May 15, said Aaron Savitski, a spokesman with the Broward State Attorney’s Office.
Earlier this week, a grand jury indicted Gingles on three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Mary Catherine Gingles, 34, her father David Ponzer, 64, and neighbor Andrew Ferrin, 36, whose Tamarac home Mary Gingles ran into as her husband stalked her before she was killed.
Court records also show Nathan Gingles is facing two counts of child abuse, and single counts of kidnapping and violating a domestic violence injunction.
After the early-morning killings on Feb. 16, the Broward Sheriff’s Office said Nathan Gingles kidnapped his daughter, which set off an Amber Alert. He was taken into custody a short time later at a Walmart in North Lauderdale. His daughter Seraphine, who followed her father barefoot as he hunted down Mary, was not hurt.
The triple murder set off alarms with BSO that led to Sheriff Gregory Tony suspending eight deputies and demoting a top officer in the Tamarac division, all believed to have been involved one way or another in the dozens of calls to the family’s home over the years. In December, a Broward judge signed a restraining order in which a deputy failed to take custody of Nathan Gingle’s weapons.
Handgun, suppressor found near shootings
Police believe one of those weapons was used in the murders. Court records show that a BSO dive team recovered a black Sig Sauer P320 handgun and a suppressor in a body of water less than half a mile away from the slayings. A Sig Sauer and suppressor with the same serial numbers were on the list of weapons deputies seized in February 2024, when Nathan Gingles was served an earlier restraining order.
Broward Sheriff’s deputies were well aware of the couple’s rocky relationship. Besides more than a dozen calls to service at their Tamarac home the past few years, Mary Gingles was so worried about her husband’s arsenal and his stated desire to kill her, that she obtained at least two restraining orders against him. The first was in February 2024.
In her divorce petition that month, she described Nathan as “heavily armed” with “semi-automatic, handguns and more sophisticated firearms” with silencers that she believed he would use to kill her.
Nathan served in the U.S. Army from February 2011 to January 2019, leaving as a captain, according to Army records. He was deployed to Afghanistan from July 2013 to January 2014. Mary, too, served in the Army from 2016 to 2020, also leaving as a captain. She had no deployments.
Nathan Gingles’ most recent job was as a contractor with the U.S. Southern Command in Doral.
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