As the 68-year-old woman testified Friday about the brutal effects of being raped and beaten with a crowbar, she paused.
The convicted Campbell County teenager known as “Mad Max” stared at the table before him.
“I’d just like for him to once look me in the eye,” the Lynchburg woman said.
Shay William Ward, 18, looked up at her across the Lynchburg Circuit Courtroom.
“You’ve raped a great-granny, you know. I hope you enjoyed it,” she said.
Ward looked back at the table.
A short time later, Circuit Judge Leyburn Mosby sentenced Ward to an active 31 years in prison for breaking into the woman’s Leesville Road home the night of May 5 and robbing and raping her at gunpoint.
Ward also beat her unconscious with a crowbar and told the woman to call him “Mad Max.”
The woman testified she suffered a cracked skull, dizzy spells that prevent her from a lot of driving and permanent decreased hearing in her good ear. Ward told police he didn’t remember most of the events because had had consumed more than 50 pills of the over-the-counter cough medicine Coricidin to get high.
He pleaded guilty in December.
After the hearing, the woman said she wanted Ward to look at her when he was sober to see what he had done and whom he had done it to.
“His eyes were dead,” she said. “He looked at me like he could have been looking at a statue.”
Before he was sentenced, Ward said that if given a second opportunity, he wouldn’t disappoint the court.
“I’d like to say I’m sorry for my actions,” he said.
Acting Lynchburg Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Doucette asked the judge to give Ward life in prison.
“Why ‘Mad Max?’ Obviously, it’s a reference to a Mel Gibson movie about a world where there’s nothing but violence and terror. Why did he tell her he was Mad Max? It’s obvious. He wanted to strike terror into her and into the community,” Doucette told the judge.
“The only guarantee we have to protect society from Mad Max is to lock him up and lock him up for the rest of his life.”
Defense attorney Jamie Angel argued that Ward already faced 21 mandatory years in prison for the firearm charges alone in both Lynchburg and Campbell County.
He said Ward, who was 17 at the time of the crimes and had no prior record, became a different person when he used drugs.
“I think everyone who knows Shay Ward, if given a second chance, he could prove it wasn’t him … It was Mad Max, a person under mind-altering substances,” Angel said.
Ward pleaded guilty last week in Campbell County to robbing a neighbor at gunpoint on Greystone Drive and burglarizing a garage. He will be sentenced for those crimes June 6.
Several friends and family members testified Friday that Ward, who used the stolen money to buy dinner and a limo for his Brookville High School prom, had always been a good kid who’d never acted violent before. They blamed the drugs for his actions.
“He was going to go into the Reserves and make a good life for himself. He got caught up with the wrong people,” his aunt testified.
“The Shay we know is before Coricidin and Mad Max.”
Two doctors testified about the effects of Coricidin, an over-the-counter drug that more teens in the country are using recreationally.
A state forensic toxicologist testified that the amount of Coricidin Ward consumed would cause extreme sedation, unconsciousness and possibly death.
However, Charles Davis, the director of Central State Hospital, testified that Ward was “seriously chemically dependent” and that he could tolerate large amounts of the drug, which would cause visual and auditory hallucinations, “emotional numbing” and an “inability to appreciate other people’s feelings.”
He said such a dependency would also make Ward incredibly susceptible to the negative effects of the drugs.
“I think (this crime) was a direct result of his chemical dependency,” Davis said.
Davis said without treatment for Ward’s chemical dependency, his illegal behavior would be nearly guaranteed to return.
Judge Mosby called the case extremely difficult.
“I’ve been searching, trying to find out what happened to you,” Mosby told Ward.
“You’ve made her into a paranoid person. She’s lost her serenity and peace of mind and there’s nothing you or I can do to give that back to her.”
Though the woman said she no longer feels safe in her own home, she refused to move, unlike neighbors on both sides of her.
After the hearing, she said she was thankful for the support she received from the local Marine Corps League, of which her late husband was a member, for taking care of her and being in court Friday.
She also said she thought the judge’s decision was “a little soft.”
“But I’ll be dead when he gets out,” she said, “and everyone will know who he is and can protect themselves.”
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