An ‘evil’ Michigan man who helped his mother torture his younger brother was seen cowering in newly-released interrogation footage as he seemed to finally realize what he had done.
Paul Ferguson, 22, is now serving a prison sentence of up to 100 years behind bars for his role in his brother Timothy Ferguson’s death on July 6, 2022.
The autistic teenager was found inside their Michigan home, weighing just 69 pounds, before an ensuing investigation found that Paul and his mother, Shanda Vander Ark, subjected the 15-year-old to merciless punishments including force feeding him hot sauce, depriving him of sleep and locking away his food.
Paul repeatedly insisted to a police officer that he and his mother never intended for Timothy to die as he held his head in his hands and buried his face on the desk, according to the interrogation footage obtained by Law & Crime.
‘I can’t even live with myself,’ he told the cop.
The officer then asked how he felt about ‘over and over again defending your mother, [talking] about how good she is?
‘Do you feel like that’s the truth anymore? Cause I’m quite disgusted by her,’ he asks, to which Paul once again insists his mother ‘never wanted this’ as he popped his head back up but refused to make eye contact with the police officer.
The cop then decided to make a point, by asking Paul how smart his mother is.
‘She’s incredibly intelligent, Magna Cum Laude, right?’ Paul answered.
‘Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought, “How can a woman that’s this smart, this intelligent, [a] graduate from law school, how could she not know what’s happening?
‘How can she think this is fake?’ he continued, referencing Paul and his mother’s claims that they thought the boy was just pretending to be starving.
‘How does she not know she is starving him? How does she not see that he’s wasting away?’ the cop asked, rhetorically.
‘And you here, you’re telling me that you’ve got some mental health issues, but you graduated from high school – and it’s very obvious to you that he’s got malnutrition to you, right?
‘It’s very obvious to you. But your mom’s here not seeing that? And she’s a law school graduate and she’s very smart? Do you see what I’m looking at here?
He then tried to convince Paul that his mother had just been manipulating him.
‘She’s a liar! She lied to you about so much stuff,’ the cop argues.
‘At some point, you need to stand up for yourself and realize she’s the manipulator, she’s the liar, she put you in this spot. She did this to your brother, using you. Do you not see that?’
Paul did not speak at all as the officer made his point, and was just seen hanging his head as he apparently took in the cop’s message.
Still, the officer continued.
‘She’s so smart. She’s smarter than any of us here, she’s smarter than me, she’s smarter than any detective here, she’s smarter than our chief of police chief, she’s smarter than all of us,’ he said of Vander Ark.
‘And we’re supposed to believe she didn’t know what was happening?’
‘No, she didn’t want him around anymore because he was too much of a problem,’ the cop argued.
‘You know that’s the truth. You can look back and see that can’t you?’ he pleaded with the brother. ‘She didn’t want him around anymore because he was too much work.
‘That’s the truth, and the second you start to believe that and understand that, then I think that’s the time you can move forward in this case,’ he concluded, prompting Paul to give a slight nod as he held his knuckle to his mouth.
Paul wound up pleading guilty to first-degree child abuse in the case, and also testified against his own mother at her trial – claiming he was also a victim of hers and was suffering ‘something close to Stockholm Syndrome.
‘I desire to find a role model that, due to my own low self-esteem, I would do anything to make them proud of me,’ he said.
‘That’s not an excuse, I know, but I feel like I’m glad I was at least able to realize it, so I could correct it.’
Vander Ark was later convicted of her son’s murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, after she was seen vomiting in court when she was shown horrifying images of Timothy’s emaciation as he starved to death.
Prosecutors also told jurors how Vander Ark forced Timothy – who was speech and motor impaired – to only eat bread covered in hot sauce, and would lock the fridge to prevent him being able to eat.
She also covered the house and the tiny closet Timothy was sleeping in with motion sensors, alarms, and live feed cameras, and testified that she purchased spicy hot sauce online after Paul thought it would be a good idea to punish the teenager.
A text message exchange between the pair showed her even questioning whether they should drop the hot sauce on the young boy’s genitals.
‘I wonder how it would feel to have that hot sauce on your private parts. I’m not saying touch him there, not at all, but dripping a little bit there, is that horrible,’ she asked.
Then, just hours before Timothy died, prosecutors said, Paul put him in an ice bath for nearly nine hours.
At his sentencing in February, Paul expressed remorse for his actions and pleaded for ‘mercy and fairness’ from the judge.
‘What reasons could justify my actions? I could make up a thousand and never believe one,’ he said in a statement.
‘What words could voice my regrets? I could think of millions, yet never feel its enough.’
But his words fell on deaf ears as the judge said he didn’t believe Paul was truly repentant.
‘The court believes Mr. Ferguson is one step away from becoming a psychopath like his mother,’ Muskegon County Circuit Judge Matthew Kacel said, according to the Grand Rapids Press.
He then defied sentencing guidelines suggesting Ferguson receive nine to 15 years behind bars due to his role in his mother’s conviction, and sentenced Paul to 30 to 100 years in prison.
The child abuser was seen retching with shock as he was warned he could be jailed until the year 2124.
He is now fighting the sentencing in court, with his attorneys arguing that his constitutional rights were violated when the judge requested copies of all text messages between him and his mother from the Muskegon County Prosecutor’s Office, according to the Grand Rapids Press.
The lawyers argue that Kacel read 2,000 pages of texts before he made his sentencing decision, which they claim should not have been taken into consideration.
They now want Kacel to recuse himself from any of Paul’s future court hearings and are asking for him to be resentenced.
