Paul Byron Ferguson (Stranger Stores).
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Paul Byron Ferguson, 22, is currently sitting at the Oaks Correctional Facility for a 30-to-100-year sentence. He had pleaded guilty to child abuse, but as reported in February, Judge Matthew Kacel, took the option to sentence him above the guidelines for horrifically mistreating the victim, Timothy Ferguson, 15. Mother Shanda Margaret Vander Ark is serving life for murdering the teenager, but Paul Ferguson played a pivotal role as her enforcer while all three lived in the same home.
“I think you’re just as bad, if not worse,” Kacel told him at his sentencing.
As established at trial, Timothy died in a small closet under the basement stairs — what amounted to his room — and his mother called him “pathetic” amid his final moments.
“You knew exactly what you were doing,” Kacel told her in her sentencing hearing in January.
He described the litany of abuse that Vander Ark subjected Timothy to. That included sleep deprivation, ice baths, forcing him to puke up food, giving him strict time limits for toilet use, forcing him to sleep in a closet, forcing him to eat bread with “California reaper” hot sauce, putting Tabasco in his mouth, making him do wall sits, and putting him under incessant monitoring.
The judge denied that this was negligence or something of the sort. Vander Ark had a goal, he said.
“Without him, you have no one to torture,” he said.
