The Case Files: Shanda Vander Ark
"You tortured this child": The mother who went from aspiring attorney to convicted killer after abusing and starving her special needs son to death.
Content warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of child abuse. Please read at your own discretion.
When paramedics arrived at a home on the 4000 block of Marshall Road in Norton Shores, Michigan on July 6, 2022 they believed they were there to tend to a 15-year-old boy whose mother claimed had become unresponsive overnight.
As they went down into the basement where the boy lay lifeless, a mortifying realization came over paramedics. Most boys this age weighed around 130 pounds on average, but the teenager before them was skin and bones beneath the sweater and jeans he wore, accompanied with an adult diaper. And the more they looked around the basement, the more a sense of dread must have set in.
They called in the Norton Shores Police Department (NSPD). One of the first responding officers would later testify in court about what he witnessed in the basement that day while he secured the scene.
The boy’s mother, Shanda Vander Ark, told police that her son, Timothy Ferguson, had ADHD and was autistic and had gone on a hunger strike three weeks earlier. He had done this once before for a two-week span, she said, when her husband had a stroke in January 2022 and had to move out of the home. She told them that the night before, she had threatened to take Timothy to the ER if he didn’t eat, prompting him to eat some toast.
Paramedics told the officer that Shanda had performed CPR on Timothy before the ambulance arrived.
The officer said Shanda “appeared distraught” and footage from his body cam confirmed she was crying when he arrived.
Timothy was declared dead there in the basement. As a white sheet was put over his body, the officer in charge of securing the scene had a look around, confounded by what he saw. Upon descending the stairs, he entered a common area, in the middle of which was a bed Shanda claimed was where Timothy had been sleeping when he became unresponsive. The officer found leg shackles in a cabinet drawer in the common area, yet one more sign that something was amiss. He explained that they were the type police would use, and that his handcuff keys fit it.
He looked around for scratches on the furniture for any indication of a child having been restrained, but found none. The bed frame was metal and also showed no signs of metal shackles having been attached to it.
Beside the bed, the officer found a closet, and within it, a tarp and cardboard box on the floor. He found two more bedrooms which appeared to belong to the other kids in the home, a bathroom, and utility room.
When he entered the bathroom, a motion-activated camera turned towards him and faced him. It followed him while he moved through the room.
“Bathroom was very dirty,” he later testified. “There were dirty adult diapers on the floor and there was no shower curtain.”
Most baffling of all was the bottle of hot sauce on the counter.
In fact, when he took a closer look, cameras had been set up all over the basement and an alarm had been rigged on the wall, the kind that went off when the door opened, though someone had deactivated it before first responders arrived.
Another camera sat on the wall opposite of Timothy’s bed, facing it. One more was in the youngest child’s bedroom, facing the door. Under Timothy’s bed, the officer found another camera laying face-down on the floor on top of what he called “junk.”
Upstairs, officers found locks and alarms on kitchen cabinets, the pantry, fridge, and freezer.
In light of Timothy’s state when he died, and the hints of something more sinister in the basement, police obtained a search warrant for the home while the scene remained secured.
It must have been eerie and horrifying to walk into. Cameras all over. Alarms, locks, shackles, a mysterious bottle of hot sauce in the bathroom, and that little closet where, it would turn out, Timothy had spent his final hours, alone, starved, and never knowing why his family treated him the way they did. Why they didn’t love him. Why no one spoke up for him, helped him, or even knew he was there, wasting away in the prison imposed on him by a dominating, sadistic mother.
When he took his last breath that morning, time had run out.
Shanda Vander Ark and her son, Paul Ferguson, would be arrested within days. Shanda faced charges of first-degree child abuse and open murder. Police charged Paul with first-degree child abuse. All that would remain would be the consequences to crash down upon the mother and son, but no punishment seemed fit for the torture that young Timothy went through.
The mother who became a monster
Timothy was a five-year-old boy when his mother first walked out of his life. 13 On Your Side obtained documents showing a long history of Shanda’s instability.
During their own investigation, MLive discovered that child services had visited the home nine times before Shanda left. In 2012, she found herself stuck in a divorce and custody battle in Oklahoma over her four children. Details from this time in her life come from Court TV.
It was widely reported that she had four boys, but in her testimony she also revealed she had a daughter, who was 19 at the time of the trial and hadn’t spoken to her in many years.
As a result of the divorce, Shanda voluntarily waived custody rights instead of having them formally terminated when she was substantiated for child abuse. Basically, in legal terms, substantiated means evidence was presented to support allegations of Shanda abusing her children but it doesn’t appear she was charged at the time. She left the home after this and was only permitted to have supervised visits limited to three hours a month, but did not lose legal custody of her kids.
Investigators found that after leaving her first husband, she had 18 different addresses as she moved between Oklahoma and Virginia until she settled into Norton Shores, Michigan. Somehow, she got custody of her youngest son somewhere in this time.
It was in Norton Shores that, on May 27, 2021, Timothy came to live with her, her second husband, Adam Ferguson, 7-year-old “G”, and 20-year-old Paul. She explained on the stand that Paul had only lived with her for about a year at this point.
Timothy’s biological father allegedly called his ex-wife and told her he would hand Timothy over to child services if she didn’t take him in. After being left by his mother once, now his father wanted to give him up. Young Timothy remained caught between a sadistic mother and a father who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to or couldn’t care for Timothy and his needs.
And for reasons unknown, Shanda took him in. Once in her hands, it became only a matter of time before Timothy’s life became a torturous and tumultuous existence during which he had no voice, and no one to speak up on his behalf. He was alone despite living with family.
While testifying, Shanda revealed that her financial situation became desperate within that same year. She said that she was studying for the bar exam while her second husband, Adam, worked full-time. Shanda explained that she trained dogs on the side, “everything from basic obedience to service dogs.” She described their financial situation as stable at the time Timothy came to live with them.
Shanda also interned at the same courthouse where she would later be tried and convicted of murder. She passed the bar exam with a score of 182, then went to work as a law clerk for the Newaygo County Circuit Court. She never made it to being sworn in as an attorney, however, as Adam suffered his stroke in January 2022. He had to go live with his parents, as he could no longer climb stairs or function in the home he shared with his wife.
The loss of that income proved devastating. Shanda explained that her brother rented the home she still owned in Oklahoma, but between the kids, still paying $1000 a month in child support, her own rent and bills, she struggled. She said she had to ask Paul for help with groceries as he worked part-time as a dishwasher at Applebee’s.
“It wasn’t even pay check to pay check,” she explained. “Almost everything was paid late. I was struggling. I asked Paul for help with groceries sometimes because we were struggling.”
She added that she couldn’t afford child care or extra expenses, and was not receiving child support.
Shanda told the court that she’d leave home at 6:30 a.m. and return to the house at about 6 p.m. Paul became a caregiver for G and Timothy, who she described as too much to handle.
“When Timothy came to live with us, his stepmother informed me that they had motion sensors,” she said. “They weren’t as tech savvy as I was. I worked in tech support for several years. She told me she didn’t sleep at night. She always slept when he was at school because he was into everything.”
Shanda told the court that the cameras in the home were originally set up to help her husband.
“My husband was born with a disability. He was wheelchair bound. So we had an extra wheelchair on the upper level, that’s where the master bedroom was. If little man, G, was down in his bedroom, my husband could talk to him and have him come up.”
She couldn’t even get Timothy into school, she claimed, as her ex-husband never transferred legal custody to her. Not only that, but she said that since Timothy damaged a Chromebook at his previous school and those fees went unpaid, his former school refused to send his records to Michigan.
The lack of custody, she said, also prevented her from seeking medical help for Timothy when he ran out of the medications his father and stepmother sent with him.
Despite this, she said that Timothy was grade-level in school and wasn’t behind. She enrolled him in a home schooling program. But, she explained, having him home all the time while she worked posed issues with a kid who, she claims, liked to take things apart.
“He took batteries apart. He took toys apart. My youngest son’s toys. If he could get a hold of anything from Paul’s room — mostly it was Legos. He at one point messed with our water heater. He actually turned the gas off to the water heater. He knocked out the pilot light, then turned the gas off as well,” Shanda said.
In her words, she was “extremely concerned” that he posed a safety hazard to the family and the home. The cameras and alarms, she said, were to monitor both Timothy and G, as she could access the cameras on her phone while she was at work.
As for the alarms on the doors, she said: “Those didn’t get installed until at least three weeks before he passed away.”
Shanda also went down a list of mental problems she allegedly had, too: Insomnia, Sensory Processing Disorder, OCD, ADHD, and then claimed she got PTSD with dissociation after Adam’s stroke. She wasn’t in the room when it happened, she said, but she was home.
When asked about the leg shackles, Shanda said Paul ordered them on her Amazon account without her knowledge.
As for the accusations that she “hid” Timothy, since the prosecution pointed out she hadn’t taken any photos of him in the last six months of his life and neighbors never saw him, Shanda said her mother-in-law visited and saw Timothy in spring of 2022. She claimed she tried to encourage Timothy to play with the neighborhood kids but he never wanted to. No, she never told Paul he couldn’t bring friends over — he just never did. When her in-laws got Timothy a bike for his fifteenth birthday, she said Paul tried to teach him how to ride it out front in the cul-de-sac where they lived.
Neighbors had no idea what happened beyond the walls of that home. The unfathomable atrocities. And when the prosecution took to presenting the evidence in court, Shanda’s story of being a struggling single mother who didn’t remember anything, shifting the blame onto Paul, unraveled quickly.
The Trial
Matt Roberts, chief trial attorney for the Muskegon County Prosecutor’s Office, outlined the spiral into the fatal maltreatment of Timothy Ferguson in his opening statements on Dec. 13, 2023.
“At one point, Timothy commits the horrendous crime of eating the crust of a burger. Leftover pieces of a burger. And when she finds out, what does she tell Paul Ferguson to do? ‘Go make him throw up.’ Sadly, Paul does that,” Roberts said.
“It’s difficult to wrap your mind around the level of depraved indifference shown to Timothy Ferguson,” he added.
At the preliminary hearing in July 2023, Roberts said the medical examiner determined Timothy’s cause of death to be a combination of hypothermia and malnourishment, MLive previously reported.
Dr. Joyce DeYoung, the Muskegon County Medical Examiner, testified that at the time of his death, Timothy weighed 69 pounds and was 68 inches tall. With no body fat and few ligaments attached, Dr. DeYoung said his body was basically breaking down under the strenuous living conditions.
“The defendant made sure that nobody could see Timothy Ferguson,” Roberts said in opening statements. “Nobody could see what was being done to him. She can’t even produce a picture of him on her cell phone in the last six months of his life.”
“Timothy Ferguson died without anyone to speak up for him, without anyone to ask, ‘what is the matter here?’” he added.
Paul was also charged with murder and child abuse, though pleaded guilty to first-degree child abuse in a plea deal that had him testify against his mother with the assurance that his testimony won’t be used against him should he face a trial, Roberts said.
Frederick Johnson, Shanda’s defense attorney, approached opening statements by commenting on the absurdity of the case.
“It’s weird,” he said. “It’s strange. It goes into the portions of our brains we hope we don’t have.”
Roberts had two binders filled with text messages between Shanda and Paul, which he said proves Shanda was in control, knew what she was doing, and carried out the punishments on Timothy with cold malice. And when she wasn’t doing it herself, she used the cameras to “critique” Paul and tell him what to do. Roberts painted a picture of a woman who needed control, who dehumanized Timothy and saw him as a burden, who used her oldest son to carry on the abuse when she wasn’t home.
Lt. Joe Hoeksema, another one of the first responding officers on the scene on July 6, 2022, testified regarding Shanda’s story that she checked on Timothy at 5:30 that morning was a lie — and cameras proved it. In watched the footage, Hoeksema didn’t only witness the last human contact Timothy had the night before, he also watched the young boy slowly die. This video was not shown in court, so they relied on Hoeksema so describe it.
The last thing Timothy ever knew was his mother’s cruelty, Hoeksema explained. Timothy’s breathing was shallow as he lay on the tarp in the closet. Shanda entered the basement and went over to Timothy.
“She clamped his mouth shut, and tells him he doesn’t need to breathe like that, and then holds his mouth shut for a period of time until he’s forced to take breaths through his nose,” Hoeksema testified. “And tells him ‘see, you don’t need to breathe through your mouth like that, you’re being a dummy or an idiot’ or something along those lines.”
Shanda left the basement between 11 and 11:30 p.m. with those being the last words she ever said to her son, the last words Timothy ever heard in his life. Hoeksema explained that Timothy spent the night slowly dying in the closet, his breathing getting more shallow with the passing hours. Hoeksema said he stopped seeing chest movements and that Timothy’s body relaxed when he finally died, alone, but finally free of the torture.
Against her attorney’s advice, Shanda took the stand in her own defense. As Roberts questioned Shanda about the various text messages, abuse allegations, and maltreatment of Timothy, she replied often with “I don’t remember that,” claiming that her insomnia led her to not function properly and caused severe memory lapses.
Roberts wouldn’t go easy on Shanda, though. At one point, he asked her if she would treat her service dogs the way she treated Timothy. She admitted she’d used hot sauce on objects to keep the dogs from chewing on things but had never forced a dog to drink it and never gave them bread.
“I never gave my dogs human food. You can’t with service animals,” she said with a shrug.
As for whether she’d put a dog in an ice bath, she said she “couldn’t imagine doing that” but admitted she told Paul to do it to Timothy.
“I personally never did it,” she said, claiming the ice was almost “non-existent” and she used it to cool down the hot water. In closing statements, Roberts referred to a text where Shanda told Paul to freeze extra ice in case they needed it for Timothy’s baths.
When a photo was shown of Timothy’s body on the basement floor the day he died while Shanda was on the stand, she vomited. Right before jury questions could be read and answered, she suffered an apparent panic attack. The court session ended.
The next day, she was no where to be seen. Johnson claimed she suffered an undisclosed medical problem and couldn’t be in the court room for the remainder of the trial. In her absence, however, it would go on.
The brother who didn’t love him enough
The most mortifying testimony came from Paul himself, who made a deal with the prosecution to testify against his mother for a shortened sentence. Finally, someone would tell the truth about what happened to Timothy in that house.
Paul corroborated that as early as February 2022, he became responsible as per Shanda’s instruction for “disciplining” Timothy. What started the cruel punishments and whose idea it was became a point of contention between the prosecution and the defense. Prosecutors allege that Shanda, the parent of the home, ordered Paul to inflict the punishments she wanted on Timothy, but her defense attorneys claimed it was Paul who wanted to start physically punishing Timothy.
The defense focused on the words “knowing” and “intentional.” Frederick Johnson claimed that Shanda and Paul didn’t know they were killing Timothy, nor did they intend to cause his death.
“What you’re going to hear over and over again is my client, Shanda Vander Ark, and her son, Paul Ferguson, had no idea that they were hurting this boy,” Johnson said. “They don’t figure out they’re hurting Tim until he’s dead.”
After realizing they had gone too far, Johnson said, “they panic, they try to make up stories.”
Johnson alleged that it was Paul who wanted to start physically punishing Timothy, who Johnson referred to as “the boy.”
When Adam suffered the stroke, leaving Shanda alone with a job and three kids, Johnson said “the wheels start to fall off in her life.”
“They love this child. But they just don’t see what’s before their eyes that you and I can see,” Johnson said.
He added that Paul “wishes he could change things now,” but that he and Shanda believed they were merely punishing Timothy, not torturing him.
The defense maintained Shanda’s claim that Timothy went on a hunger strike about three weeks before he died.
Paul took the stand and dismantled this claim. He explained how after Adam had the stroke and moved out, he became responsible for administering discipline to Timothy. In February 2022, he said Shanda and him began discussing ways to block Timothy’s access to food.
“He was sneaking food that was not necessary at that time, and it was solved by placing locks on the fridge, freezer, and pantry,” Paul told the prosecution.
When asked who determined which foods were necessary or not, Paul replied that Shanda made the call.
By April, Paul said Timothy was pulling the locks off by hand, and Shanda instructed Paul to replace them. He also confirmed that Timothy had attention deficit hyperactive disorder and autism, and struggled with speech and movement impairments. Timothy was supposed to be taking medications, though Paul noted that his brother had stopped taking them as per Shanda’s decision.
Roberts asked Paul if Timothy ever went to the doctor after moving in with them, to which Paul said no. Both Timothy and G were home schooled. In fact, Paul revealed, Shanda rarely permitted Timothy to leave the house at all, besides being allowed to “walk the dog sometimes” in the backyard.
Timothy did his school assignments on a tablet, though Paul said Shanda took that from her son, too.
“At first, it was assignments on a tablet and then my mother restricted it to where she’d print out the assignments and he would sit downstairs and do them.”
Paul described how he and Shanda made Timothy run up and down the patio stairs in the backyard, where they were out of sight of pedestrians and drivers on the street. He would follow Timothy up and down to “ensure he moves faster.”
Paul watched over those six months as his younger brother deteriorated before his eyes. When Timothy arrived at the home in January 2022, “he had a good amount of chubbiness to him,” Paul noted.
There was no hunger strike, never had been, Paul told Roberts, only the food restrictions and locks in the kitchen as per Shanda’s orders. Shanda had locks wherever there was food access, as well as cameras and vibration detectors all over the house, including on Timothy himself, as Paul described. This was so both he and Shanda could watch Timothy via a cell phone app that alerted them if there was motion or movement.
“Mainly he was restricted to the downstairs area, to a closet,” Paul said. He noted that his and G’s bedrooms were also in the basement. There had been a bunkbed set up for Timothy at one point.
“Where did he actually sleep most nights?” Roberts asked.
“In the closet,” Paul said.
He explained that Shanda installed a camera in the closet and monitored Timothy “even when he slept.” She’d allegedly put an alarm on the closet door and motion sensors. Paul confirmed he was required to watch that cameras at times when Shanda couldn’t.
Timothy was subjected to other punishments. Paul described how he and Shanda made Timothy do “wall sits,” in which Timothy would have to squat against the wall without sitting on anything. He was forced to stand against the wall upstairs by the back door or on the wall between Paul and G’s room for hours, sometimes overnight.
When in the closet, Paul said Timothy was required to have his hands on his head and was forced to sit on his knees for hours at a time. Timothy had vibrator detectors tied to the belt loop on his pants and on the zip cuffs tied to his hands. Paul told Roberts that Timothy would complain “they were too tight.”
“What was your mother’s responses to Tim complaining about those being too tight?” Roberts asked.
“Leave them and she’d deal with them after she got home,” Paul responded.
Paul explained how he and his mother worked opposing shifts. Shanda was a court clerk and worked during the day. He confirmed she was out of the house between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Paul spent his nights from 4 p.m. to closing time washing dishes at Applebee’s. The mother and son weren’t often at home together as a result of the conflicting schedules. During the day, Paul was responsible for his younger siblings. In one message to his mother, Paul expressed frustration with his brother:
“I'm ready to kill Timothy.”
Further messages revealed that Shanda and Paul believed Timothy was faking his behavior, with Shanda often instructing Paul to throw ice water on Timothy and feed him bread covered in hot sauce. One of the texts from Shanda reads:
“I ended up dragging him back into his small room because I wasn't gonna risk having him access to the tub or things overnight. He’s still trying to be stupid, but I will tell you more tomorrow while I take you to work, describing how many different ways I can prove that he is faking. He's still doing it though. It’s beyond ridiculous.”
Another disturbing message from her questioned “how it would it feel to have hot sauce on your private parts?”
Timothy was moved from his bunk bed to the closet, Paul said, where a tarp was put down on the floor because Shanda “didn’t want him urinating on the floor.” As a result, Timothy wore adult diapers, Paul said, also revealing that Shanda even timed how long Timothy could use the bathroom. He was permitted one minute to urinate, and at the longest for anything else, two minutes.
Paul confirmed that Shanda had asked him to feed Timothy bread with hot sauce poured on it. Roberts asked, why?
“Um,” Paul said. “Because he was supposedly misbehaving.”
“I would put it on bread, have him stand in the kitchen area near the back door and watch him eat until he finished,” he continued, saying that Timothy had to eat the bread until “it was all gone.”
If he did that, Paul said, then Shanda would let Timothy have a plain piece of bread after waiting for 30 minutes.
“Did it ever look like he wanted to eat the bread with hot sauce?” Roberts wondered.
“No,” Paul said.
Shanda took it one step further, Paul told the court, and began getting Paul to pour hot sauce directly into Timothy’s mouth. He alleges that this was also done “under her orders.”
In April 2022, Timothy committed the “horrendous crime” Roberts described in his opening statements: he ate the crust of an unfinished burger.
“Make him throw it up,” Paul replied when Roberts asked what Shanda’s response was to Paul’s text about the incident.
“I tried at first, yes,” Paul added, by “putting a finger into his mouth, as instructed, into the back of his throat to induce vomiting.”
Shanda was at work that day, but she and Paul communicated via the cameras, which enabled two-way conversations as needed. His mother had him make Timothy vomit “three or four other times,” he said.
When it came to Timothy’s ice baths, Paul said he would “plug the tub, turn on the water, and take the ice that was in the ice maker upstairs and put it in, and have him get in.”
Timothy was supposed to remain in the bath for 30 minutes. Paul said he subjected his brother to these baths three times before Timothy died, as per Shanda’s orders.
Through a camera on the bathroom counter, Shanda would monitor these baths, Paul told the court. Paul was instructed to stay with Timothy to “ensure he couldn’t get comfortable or try to turn the water hot.”
On June 13, 2022, text message records show that Paul took a photo of an emaciated Timothy, thin and malnourished, then sent it to Shanda.
“I was concerned with how thin he was,” Paul testified.
All Shanda told Paul was to give his brother some bread.
“That day I made him an actual real meal,” Paul continued. The meal, he said, consisted of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and scrambled eggs with cheese. He never told his mother.
“I didn’t want her to be upset with me,” he remarked.
Roberts later pointed to a text message conversation between Shanda and Paul. When she testified, Shanda claimed that Paul had bought the hot sauce online and she knew nothing about it. On July 2, 2022, Paul sent her a message which read: “So, apparently this hot sauce isn’t just Carolina Reaper, it’s also Trinidad Scorpion Chili Pepper.”
Shanda replied with just one word.
“Yep.”
Shortly after that message, Shanda discussed buying chicken nuggets and fries for her youngest son, “G.”
Instead of getting help for Timothy, they left him in the ice bath the day before he died
Paul testified that he knew something was seriously wrong the day before his brother’s death when Timothy was unresponsive to Paul’s attempts to wake him up. Shanda was already awake, with the cameras activated, as Paul screamed and yelled at Timothy to try to get him to wake up. As always, Timothy had slept in the closet that night on the tarp, wearing only an adult diaper.
“Normally it wasn’t difficult before then,” Paul told Roberts.
Instead of seeking medical help for Timothy, Paul stated that Shanda told him simply to put Timothy in an ice bath to wake him up. Paul described having to drag Timothy, who remained unresponsive, to the bathroom and placing him into the ice bath at about 2 p.m. Timothy at this point wasn’t even talking.
Paul said Shanda instructed him to make Timothy “uncomfortable and at one point she had me heat up a pizza roll to see if he would be responsive to enticement.”
Paul obeyed her.
“I held it close and when he responded, as per instruction, I was to pull it away from him,” Paul continued.
He once again obeyed. However, when Shanda suggested pouring hot sauce on Timothy’s genitals, Paul said he finally told his mother no.
“That was beyond cruel, as everything else was,” Paul testified.
Paul had to be at work for four, he said, but “unfortunately due to a flat tire on my e-bike, I had to wait til six for my mother to get home and drive me to work.”
Timothy, he added, was in the bath the entire time, even when Shanda and Paul left to get him to work.
As per phone records, Shanda texted Paul at 11:30 that night while he was work. He said he didn’t read it until later, as he was busy. But it confirmed that Timothy “was still in the tub,” nine hours after Paul had first placed him in there.
Paul caught a ride home with a coworker and got in at about 1 a.m., he told Roberts. Paul went to his room, and said he didn’t see Timothy or check in on him. He said the next morning, “I had to get up early. So did Shanda, to drive me to the premise area of work and I’d gone to the laundry room to get a pair of clean socks, and was then made aware that he was not breathing.”
Timothy was back in the closet by this point, Paul told the court. Shanda told him that Timothy wasn’t breathing. Paul said he asked Shanda if she was going to call 911.
“She said no,” Paul remarked. “I was attempting to resuscitate though it was too late.”
Shanda had Paul help her remove Timothy from the closet, he explained. He helped her put clothes on Timothy as she instructed, in “a hoodie, a pair of my jeans, and Shanda had me remove my belt and put it on him” because the pants were too big.
Paul estimated that about 18 minutes passed between this and when he finally called 911. He didn’t recall Shanda talking to the dispatcher. In those minutes, Paul said that Shanda told him to say Timothy “had gone on a hunger strike. And say that he was found on the bed.”
The police arrived and processed the scene, leaving Paul and Shanda alone in the house later that night, while G had spent the day at his grandparents’ home, Paul testified. Shanda allegedly spent that night disposing of evidence, Paul said. The vibration detectors and cameras not confiscated by cops were thrown out in the trash near the house. The alarms were so loud, Paul said they could be heard through walls, aggravating Timothy’s sensitive hearing.
Defense alleges that Paul not as innocent as he seems: “This isn’t love.”
Frederick Johnson used the cross-examination as a means of asking Paul some tougher questions, such as why, if Timothy hadn’t been on a hunger strike, did Paul tell the detectives at the first interview that he was.
Paul admitted that he initially lied.
“But then I cracked and told him, well, everything. That was the part that you missed,” Paul said.
But Paul didn’t recall allegedly telling detectives that Timothy could walk and there was never anything wrong with him. Johnson also pointed out that Paul told detectives that Timothy wanted to sleep in “The Small Room,” as he and Shanda referred to the closet.
Paul told detectives that Timothy would loosen the nuts and bolts on the bunk bed, rendering it a safety hazard.
“Originally the closet had a mattress which Tim ripped so we removed it,” Paul testified. He also claimed that Timothy would sneak out of the house to the garage and other places in the house.
Johnson stated that on the day before Timothy died, Shanda sent a text to Paul instructing him to give Timothy two pizza rolls if he responded to the first one. Paul said he didn’t recall this text, but he does recall his mother telling him to take it back if Timothy snatched for it.
“Why not give him the pizza roll?” Johnson asked.
“Because I was doing as I was told,” Paul replied.
Johnson also noted that Paul’s claims of feeding Timothy the sandwich and scrambled eggs wasn’t in a police report or his interview, nor was it mentioned at the preliminary hearing.
“But there was an opportunity to sneak him some food, and you snuck him some food,” Johnson remarked. But he questioned Paul as to why, in his time working at Applebees, did he never stop on his way home to get food for Timothy.
“At 1 a.m., everything is closed,” Paul told him.
Johnson disagreed, saying that a gas station on Paul’s route home was open that late, though Paul maintained that it wasn’t. Johnson relied heavily on the text message conversations between the mother and son for the line of questioning.
“You kept saying during the texts that you were under the impression that what Timothy was going through was an act,” Johnson said. “Do you remember that?”
Paul admitted that despite the seizures and the shaking, he was convinced that Timothy was “faking it.” Paul also claimed that during the “wall sits” and arduous hours on his feet and knees, Timothy never cried, “but he complained.”
And Shanda, he added, never said out loud what the cameras and monitors were for, but Paul knew it was all for watching Timothy.
After Adam’s stroke, Paul said it was only he and his mother providing for the family. Paul was only 19 when he took on the responsibility. Johnson informed him that during this time, Shanda was experiencing insomnia and wasn’t sleeping. Paul claimed he had no idea.
Johnson also pointed out that Shanda relied heavily on Paul for information about what she couldn’t see on the cameras, and Paul gave her that information. However, Johnson reminded Paul of what else he said during the police interview:
“We weren’t neglecting him. And if we were, it wasn’t intentional.”
“This isn’t love,” Johnson said.
Paul agreed, and admitted that the detective during the interview shouldn’t have had to tell him how disgusting the behaviors against Timothy were.
When Timothy died, Paul said he “was surprised, shocked, horrified.” He described Shanda as “frantic” but noted she didn’t cry. Instead, she was “trying to cover it up.”
Johnson offered the court another piece of Paul’s interview with detectives:
“If I could take his place right now, if I could give him his life back, I’d do it. I’d do it in a dag gum heart beat.”
Without hesitation, Paul replied to the court: “I stand by it.”
Paul said that following Timothy’s death, he concluded that Shanda had intended for him to die. But Paul maintained that he never meant for it to happen. He described his relationship with his mother as “something similar to Stolkholm syndrome.”
“I have a desire to find a role model that, due to my low self-esteem, I would do anything to make proud of me,” he continued. “And that’s not an excuse, I know, but I feel like I’m glad that I was at least able to realize it so I can correct it.”
Paul claimed not to remember a text Johnson brought up from Shanda which asked, “should we be worried?” to which Johnson says Paul replied, “No.” But as Johnson pointed out, “no” wasn’t an answer Paul gave to his mother often, not until she asked him to pour hot sauce on Timothy’s genitals.
“As you sit there right now,” Johnson said. “Do you love Timothy?”
“I suppose I didn’t love him enough,” Paul replied. “That’s why I’m trying to bring justice for him.”
In closing statements, Roberts said there is nothing Shanda can hide behind that could let her evade justice.
“She did all of these horrible, things, and she doesn’t get to hide behind saying ‘I just don’t remember doing these things’ or ‘I didn’t intend to Timothy to come to any harm,’” he said.
In instructing the jury on what burden needed to be met to find her guilty of first-degree child abuse, he told them that the prosecution had to prove that Shanda is the parent of Timothy Ferguson and that the defendant knowing or intentionally caused serious physical and/or mental harm to Timothy. He explained that serious physical harm meant any physical injury to the child which seriously impairs the child’s health or physical well being, which could include brain damage, skull or bone fractures, dislocations, hemorrhaging, sprains, internal injuries, burns, scalds, or severe cuts.
“She killed him. She starved him to death,” he said.
He added that Shanda knowing not only starved him, but triggered Timothy’s sensory issues between the unbearable hot sauce, ice baths, alarms, noise, and sleep deprivation. Her own son was not a human being to her. She had dehumanized him to the point where he meant nothing to her.
“He was less than a dog to her,” Roberts stated.
The jury agreed. After deliberating for only two hours, they returned a verdict finding Shanda Vander Ark guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree child abuse. She was sentenced to life in prison for the murder conviction, and 50 to 100 years for the child abuse conviction.
After pleading guilty to first-degree child abuse, Paul is serving a minimum 30-year-sentence for his role in the abuse of the younger brother he said he simply didn’t love enough to save from their mother.
According to WOOD TV, two figures came out of the background to speak up for Timothy upon Shanda’s conviction: Millie Ferguson, Timothy’s older sister, and their brother, Nolan.
As the victim impact statements were read out, Roberts stood with the siblings.
Shanda, he said, never even looked up at her adult kids as they spoke, and declined to speak.
Millie, Shanda’s only daughter, confirmed that she hadn’t spoken to her mother in many years, but wished she’d done so if only for Timothy’s sake.
“I like to say I don’t regret things in my life, that every mistake I’ve made has made me who I am today. But when Timothy died, I couldn’t stop regretting. I regret not hugging him more and teasing him so much instead of telling him that I loved him every once in a while. I regret not putting aside my differences with Shanda (Vander Ark) and Paul (Ferguson) just to check in on him,” she said. “…There’s no fixing what’s been done, no way to redo it all over again. And that’s my regret: that I couldn’t protect him when he needed me most.”
Nolan said he was home with his wife when he got the call about Timothy. Both he and Millie asked the court to send their mother to prison for life.
“I’ve had to leave my career behind. My wife has to watch helplessly as I struggle day in and day out, wondering how none of us knew what was going on, wondering if I told Tim-Tim I loved him enough times for him to remember up until the very end,” he explained.
“If I can’t have my brother back, (Vander Ark) shouldn’t have her freedom back,” he continued. “And lastly, I want everyone to know that to those who knew him, even that wouldn’t feel like justice. Because the life of one sweet little blue-eyed boy is not equivalent to that of a murderer.”
“I will always love Timothy like I always have,” Nolan said.
“And I want the world to know that Timothy was wanted, if not by her, then by me,” Millie added.
The Appeal
In a brazen move, Shanda actually appealed the conviction and the termination of her parental rights to her youngest son. She faces no chance at parole and would have to see her conviction completely overturned and get a whole new trial, where she would have to be found not guilty on both charges.
However, on Sept. 19, 2024, MLive reported that the Michigan Court of Appeals gave an 11-page opinion on why her parental rights termination appeal should be denied — and it was.
“Given the totality of the evidence, it cannot be said that the trial court clearly erred when it found that termination was in (the boy’s) best interests,” the court said.
The now 8-year-old boy is living with his grandparents. A judge noted that he is safe and healthy there.
“Other evidence showed that (the boy) had done very well in his placement with his grandparents and that he had a strong and healthy bond with them,” the opinion papers said.
There has yet to be a hearing for the appeal of her criminal convictions.
MLive notes that Paul is also appealing his sentence.
In the end, both Shanda and Paul were guilty of the abuse against Timothy which ultimately killed him. “I was only following orders” didn’t stand as a defense for Nazis at the Nuremburg trials, and it certainly doesn’t stand for a grown man who knew this was wrong all along.
And of all ironies at the sentence hearing, Judge Matthew Kacel compared the photos of Timothy when he died to those of Holocaust victims, WOOD TV reported. It’s a depraved kind of cruelty to inflict such torture onto a child.
“I’ve been trying now for this entire case to wrap my mind around how somebody could do something so horrific, not only to another human being but to their own child,” Judge Matthew Kacel said to Shanda during that hearing. “…You intentionally and systematically tortured this child. Let’s call it what it is: It’s torture. You tortured this child.”
Kacel said he exceeded the guidelines for the child abuse sentencing due to the “long term suffering” Timothy went through.
“I don’t think they (the guidelines) would take into consideration the amount of absolute, systematic, consistent torture that you engaged in here,” he added.
And in the end, Kacel displayed a photo of a younger Timothy, smiling and happier, in an attempt to preserve his dignity to conclude the trial.
“I’m choosing to remember him like that. And you can’t even look at him,” Kacel said to Shanda. “That’s how he was: a beautiful child with a lot of life in his eyes. That’s who your son was, and you took that from him.”
Fatal Maternity (Part 5): Child Maltreatment
This series started with filicidal mothers who lost themselves to mental illness. Who, in the chaotic midst of a psychotic episode or mental breakdown, killed her children, only to regret it in the aftermath. Women who were good, devoted mothers who thought they were doing what was best for the children, no matter how outlandish the reason.
My Substack is all free with paid subscriptions being optional. I also have a Ko-Fi for one-time donations. Any support goes towards creating more content and books and furthering my writing career. All support, financial or not, is appreciated!
Sources
13 On Your Side
Norton Shores Police press release
MLive