A man has been arrested for repeatedly raping his severely disabled daughter.
Brian Kenneth Urban was caught after the girl’s mother installed cameras in the bedroom to monitor her seizures.
Brian, 51, pled guilty to five felony charges after raping his 31-year-old disabled stepdaughter, Ashley Vigil.
The 31-year-old woman has a rare disorder known as Rett syndrome, a genetic mutation that affects brain development in girls and affects fewer than 1,000 people in the US.
‘She’s grown to about the size of an eight-year-old girl. She’s unable to communicate,’ Ashley’s mother Paula Vigil, 49, said. ‘Her seizures had suddenly increased.’
Paula takes care of Ashley full-time and has identified her as the victim, in this case, to help pass ‘Ashley’s Law,’ which she believes will help protect vulnerable adults in the same way that children and elderly people are protected by laws.
While Urban pled guilty to the charges, including rape and forcible sexual abuse, the victim and her family are still facing the nightmare caused by his repeated abuse.
The disturbing revelations of Urban’s sickening behaviour came about in October 2022 after Ashley’s doctor recommended that Paula set up cameras in her bedroom to monitor her daughter’s mysterious seizures to gain some understanding of what was going on.
‘Instead of catching the seizures, I caught him,’ Paula told 2KUTV.
‘In her condition, she [Ashley] can’t move. He had to completely undress her, move her to the couch, and take her diaper off, to do what he did.
Then he had to dress her and put her back in her bed, so I wouldn’t know.’
Paula believes that the seizures were a result of Ashley’s body screaming for help.
‘Her body was seizing, and she was crying for help in the only way she could,’ Paula said. ‘If not for those cameras, I would have never known, and I would have never had proof.’
After the horrific discovery, Paula called dispatch, and South Jordan police arrested Urban.
The abuser is currently behind bars at the Salt Lake County Jail – but there is no mandatory minimum prison sentence for Urban, as of now, because of Ashley’s age.
Nathan Woodward, a Utah attorney, saw Paula’s story on Facebook and was ‘rattled.’ He decided to reach out and offer to help the family.
‘I just want Paula and Ashley to feel heard. There’s a real gap in how our law is written and applied,’ Woodward said.
The attorney explained that when someone is raped and their attacker is found guilty, the severity of punishment is determined by whether the victim was an adult or a minor.
However, ‘no substantive consideration is given as to an adult victim’s mental capacity, resulting in an inconsistent underlying philosophy as to why we justify more severe punishments for crimes against children,’ he explained.
Paula explained that there is no mandatory prison sentence for Urban, so the family has no idea what the sentencing will be.
‘She [Ashley] is an infant in an adult body. He did this to someone who could not fight back. He should be getting a mandatory prison sentence, and there’s just this hole in the system.’
Paula and Woodward are hoping to pass ‘Ashley’s Law’ to account for vulnerable adults in response to the broken system.
The heartbroken mother said she made a promise to her daughter that ‘she would never be anywhere where she wasn’t safe.’ She said ‘he took that one thing I promised away.’
‘Brian Kenneth Urban came into our lives pretending. The act he put on convinced me. Convinced me he loved my girls and would care for them as I do. That he would protect them,’ Paula said on Facebook. ‘Little did I know, what we needed protection from was him.’
