The son of an Orange County Superior Court judge on trial for murder in the shooting death of his wife told the jury a slightly different story on Thursday, Feb. 20 from the one he told investigators hours after the killing.
During the second day of Judge Jeffrey Ferguson’s murder trial, his adult son, Phillip, offered a description of an argument that night between his father and his mother, Sheryl Ferguson, and a timeline for the shooting that at times appeared at odds with the prosecution’s arguments and the son’s own earlier interviews with police.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Seton Hunt told jurors during the prosecution’s opening statements on Wednesday that a heated argument between the judge and his wife ended with the wife — angered at her husband pointing his finger at her to mimic a firearm — allegedly telling him something to the effect of “Why don’t you use a real gun?” and the judge immediately responding by pulling a .40 caliber Glock from his ankle holster and fatally shooting his wife.
Phillip, the couple’s then 22-year-old son, was the only other person in the room at the Anaheim Hills home when the shooting occurred, making him a key witness in his father’s ongoing trial. Speaking to a detective the night of the shooting, Phillip appeared to describe witnessing both his father pulling the weapon out of his holster and firing the gun.
“She (the mother) goes ahead and says ‘why don’t you pull a real gun on me’ or something like that,” The son said in a portion of the recorded interview played during the trial. “I turn around and that is when I see my dad pull out his gun and aim it at her and fire.”
The detective who spoke to Phillip that night also testified that the son previously described the shooting as happening immediately — “a second” — after the mother’s alleged comment about using a “real gun.”
But Phillip during his testimony on Thursday denied seeing his father actually pull the gun from the holster or aim it at his mother. The son testified that he was trying to open a sliding glass door and turned around just before the gun fired. He also described a longer delay — up to 30 seconds — between the mother’s alleged comment and the shooting.
“I saw the gun elevated in the air and saw it discharge,” Phillip testified.
It isn’t clear how the son’s testimony will play into the defense theory of the shooting. Attorneys representing Ferguson are waiting until later in the trial to present their opening statements to the jury. But other defense attorneys formerly involved in the case previously described the shooting as a “terribly unfortunate discharge.”
His parents had been arguing all evening about finances, Phillip testified, including while the three of them ate at a restaurant near their house and after they returned home to watch episodes of the television show “Breaking Bad” together in their family room.
Hunt, the prosecutor, during his opening statement told jurors that the son was so unnerved by the argument that he got up to retrieve a replica sword. But during his testimony, the son described his parents “bickering” that night, not having a shouting match. And he told the prosecutor he couldn’t recall if he grabbed the sword before or after the shooting.
“Did your dad at any time say or do anything that was threatening toward your mom before the gun went off?” Defense attorney Cameron Talley asked.
“Not that I recall,” the son responded.
“This didn’t strike you as some unusually volatile argument?”
“No.”
The son described staying with a family friend and then at a hotel in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. But Phillip — who was home from college for the summer with his parents when the shooting occurred – acknowledged that he had since mended his relationship with his father and has lived at times with him in the Anaheim Hills home.
Immediately after the shooting, Judge Ferguson texted a clerk and a bailiff assigned to the courtroom he had presided in at the Fullerton Courthouse, telling them “I just lost it, I just shot my wife, I won’t be in tomorrow. I will be in custody. I’m so sorry.” One of the first officers who arrived at the Ferguson home testified that he heard the judge say, “I did it” and “shoot me.”
Among the many comments Ferguson was recorded saying while in police custody were remarks to himself about how he might address the jury at his own future trial.
“I killed her,” Ferguson said, in a video that was shown in court to Ferguson’s actual jury. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, convict my ass. I did it.”
Testimony in the trial resumes on Friday and is expected to continue into next week in a Santa Ana courtroom. A Los Angeles County judge is presiding over the trial, in order to avoid a conflict of interest with Ferguson’s Orange County judicial colleagues.