Mother sentenced for starving, torturing her son

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Judge Matthew R. Kacel shows a picture of Timothy Ferguson in court on Jan. 23, 2023. The teen’s mother, Shanda Margaret Vander Ark, starved and tortured him to death. (Screenshot: WZZM; mug shot: Muskegon County Jail)

The Michigan woman who starved and tortured her special needs son to death will spend the rest of her days behind bars, having received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole on Tuesday for felony murder. She also received an additional 50 to 100 years for first-degree child abuse. The judge applied 575 days of time served to both charges.

The attorney for Shanda Margaret Vander Ark, 44, maintained that she did not intend to kill Timothy Ferguson, 15. Lawyer Fred Johnson said that “something broke” in her mentally, and that she and her co-defendant son, Paul Ferguson, did not know of the damage they were causing until it was too late.

But Judge Matthew R. Kacel described the litany of abuse that Vander Ark subjected to Timothy. 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 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.

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.

Johnson maintained his client, an excellent student who put herself through college and law school after growing up in the face of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father and later her stepfather, was not aware of the damage she was causing because “something broke” in her mentally.

“This case makes no sense to anybody,” Johnson said.

Speaking at the end of the hearing on Tuesday, Kacel said that Vander Ark acted knowingly, even if she did not mean to kill her son.

“You knew exactly what you were doing,” he said.

For example, she hid the child from his grandparents and even another child at the home. She made sure to close the garage doors when making Timothy clean up the area without pants. When she relented on a threatened punishment to make the victim drink salt water, it was not because it was wrong, it was because she did not want to give him an “excuse” to sit on the toilet from diarrhea.

“That was your justification,” he said. “Not that it would hurt him.”

Paul Ferguson, who was 19 when Timothy died, has pleaded guilty to first-degree child abuse for his role in the mistreatment and testified against their mother. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 26.

He did not appear in court on Tuesday. It was two of their siblings, Millie Joan Ferguson and Eric Nolan Ferguson Jr., who spoke on Timothy’s behalf on Tuesday.

Her brother, who goes by Nolan, said he was living with his wife when he got a phone call that his “baby brother” was dead.

For both siblings, grief is an ongoing challenge.

“I will always love Timothy like I always have,” Nolan said.

They both asked that their mother spend her life in prison.

“And I want the world to know that Timothy was wanted, if not by her, then by me,” Millie Ferguson said.

Prosecutor Matt Roberts told the judge he made it a point to stand by the siblings’ side as they delivered their victim impact statements. He said that Vander Ark never looked up at her children as they spoke. He argued that she had stopped thinking of her children as human. They are “not people to her,” he said.

Vander Ark declined to speak when asked.

At the end of the hearing, Kacel showed the court a picture of a smiling, healthier Timothy. The judge said he was choosing not to remember him “dead, looking like a Holocaust victim” and instead remember him as “a beautiful child with a lot of life in his eyes.”