Motivated by Drug Abuse Lecture : Girl, 13, Turns In Parents--and $2,800 in Cocaine

For some time, 13-year-old Deanna Young told Tustin police, she had suspected her parents were using drugs.

The first hints, she told officers, were the odor of marijuana and furtive gestures by her parents. Then she found what she believed were marijuana seeds around the house and confronted her mother, police said Wednesday.

There were also pleas to her father to quit using drugs, according to other authorities involved in the case. She began flushing marijuana down the toilet, they said. Soon, she discovered what she believed were cocaine vials in her parents’ bureau drawers. She said she found other vials stuffed under the living room couch.

Finally, on Tuesday night, after attending a church lecture by an off-duty policeman on the effects of drugs, Deanna decided “she was going to do something about drugs in her home,” police said.

She turned her parents in.

In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning, the blonde, blue-eyed junior high school student walked into the police station carrying a trash bag containing about an ounce of cocaine estimated by police of having a street value of $2,800. Also in the bag were drug packaging equipment and small amounts of marijuana and pills. By sunrise, her mother and father had been arrested and jailed.

“It’s really the reverse of what we hear of parents fighting and fighting to keep their kids off of drugs,” said Tustin Police Capt. Fred Wakefield. “For that reason, this case is ironic.”

Wakefield and Tustin Police Chief Charles Thayer recounted the story Wednesday after police interviewed Deanna, some of her friends and at least one adult who knows the girl.

Wakefield, who described Deanna as “very sincere,” said investigators believe her story.

“Everything that has happened, everything we have learned from talking to different people, lends credibility to what she has said,” he said. “. . . That’s a lot of cocaine for a 13-year-old girl to come up with to frame mom and dad, only to lose later. The money alone that it would have taken her to buy it.

“Her basic demeanor seemed to be fitting with a 13-year-old girl who was telling on her parents. She was calm, but she was apprehensive about the circumstances,” Wakefield added. “She’d made her mind up that this was her last resort. She wasn’t happy about it; she wasn’t pleased.”

The girl’s father, Bobby Dale Young, 49, a bartender at a Santa Ana tavern, and her mother, Judith Ann Young, 37, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court clerk, were arrested on suspicion of possession of cocaine for sale.

They were booked into the Orange County Jail and held in lieu of $25,000 bail each, Wakefield said.

Meanwhile, Deanna was taken by police to Orangewood, the Orange County shelter for abused and abandoned children, officers said.

A Juvenile Court hearing will be held before the weekend to determine whether she should remain in protective custody, authorities said.

Wakefield said the turning point for Deanna apparently came at Tuesday night’s church gathering, which she attended along with two friends. There she heard the off-duty officer talk about the effects of drug abuse.

“She told us that after the church meeting (that) she said (to herself) she was going to do something about the drugs in her home,” Wakefield said.

The teen-ager told police that she went home and rummaged through her house for “all the drugs she knew to be all over the house--in the bedroom and under the couch--and took them over to her friend’s house,” Wakefield said.

From there, the girl said, she called another friend who had a car, Wakefield said, and the pair drove back to the girl’s home to pick up another vial of cocaine that she had forgotten. The girl’s father was at work; it was not clear Wednesday whether the mother was at home at the time.

Shortly after midnight, the girl, toting a plastic trash bag, walked into the Tustin police station and told her story, Wakefield related. He said part of the cocaine the girl turned over to police was in small packages that police said could be bought on the street for $50 and $100.

Her father, who got off work about 2 a.m., was arrested outside the family home; her mother, who apparently did not know of her husband’s arrest, was taken into custody when she arrived at the police station to pick up her daughter, Wakefield said.