Shane Sloan was found guilty Friday of first-degree murder and then sentenced to life in state prison with no chance of parole for strangling his mother last February in the Pine Township trailer they shared.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for nearly three hours on the fate of Sloan, a 29-year-old who faced first- and third-degree murder charges.

When the jury foreman read the verdict early Friday evening, relatives and friends of the late Susan LaRue Fleeger cried out -- a sudden burst of sobs and sighs and tears and wails.

Sloan stared straight ahead, clenching his teeth.

Before Mercer County Common Pleas Judge Michael J. Wherry handed down the mandatory life sentence, Sloan's younger sisterBrandi Cooper -- they were Ms. Fleeger's only children -- took the stand to read statements from her mother's best friend and sister and then make her own emotional ones.

With Sloan's role in the killing never in question, the jury had to decide whether to convict him on a first- or third-degree murder charge.

Third-degree murder, which carries a sentence of between 20 and 40 years in prison with a chance of parole, is "any killing with malice," Wherry told jurors before they began deliberating.

Wherry said first-degree murder, the "most serious of two very serious offenses," has one additional element to it -- that the accused killed with a specific intent to do so.

Argument over "specific intent" was the hub of the case.

Under the law, specific intent means that the accused had a "fully formed intent to kill and was conscious of that intention," Wherry told jurors.

Sloan's attorneys made a "diminished capacity" defense, which claimed that at the time of the killing Sloan was "suffering from a mental disorder and incapable of forming the specific intent to kill his mother," Wherry said.

Sloan has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a manic depressive disorder marked by emotional highs and lows.

First-degree murder must be a willful, premeditated or deliberate act, but it "does not require planning or previous thought for any length of time," Wherry said. "It can happen quickly," he added.

Sloan attacked his mother after she interrupted his second suicide attempt of the morning on Feb. 5, 2001 -- the day he was supposed to report to Mercer County Jail to begin serving a 12-day sentence for failing to pay fines for retail theft.

Killing her required on-the-fly thinking and serious, grave decision-making, prosecutors said. During the prosecution's closing argument Friday morning, Assistant District Attorney Samuel Zuck outlined the chronology of the day of the murder, which Sloan had detailed on the stand the day before.

Sloan first tried to "knock out" his mother with four punches to the face so he could get back to the business of killing himself. When that didn't work, Sloan put his left hand around his mother's neck, first to restrain her struggle and then to cut her air so she would go unconscious. The struggle continued and they fell. Sloan then grabbed a bloody towel on his shoulder and wrapped it around her neck three times, pulling it tight until his mother stopped moving.

After the proceedings Friday, Assistant District Attorney David Ristvey -- who tried the case along with Zuck -- said, "The mental-deficiency claim was not supported by the evidence and not based upon reason or common sense. I am glad the jury was able to see through the defense in this case and see the case as we (the DA's office) saw it.

"From the beginning, we have always felt that this was clearly and overwhelmingly a case of first-degree murder."

Sloan is the first person to be convicted of first-degree murder in Mercer County since April 2000, when then 24-year-old Ronald Fuller was found guilty but spared the death penalty for a Memorial Day weekend shooting the year before in Sharon. Leon R. "Luggo" Grande was 60 when he pleaded guilty in April 2001 to third-degree murder for killing his girlfriend in her Sharpsville home.

In his 25-plus years as a prosecutor, District Attorney James P. Epstein said Sloan's is the first murder case he remembers in which the accused used a mental illness defense and testified.

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Tom Fontaine at

tfontaine@sharon-herald.com