Deanna and Her Parents Meet for 15 Minutes--Happily, It Seems

The brief meeting Friday may have been riddled with tension, but it was laughter that filtered out of the small room in Orange County Juvenile Court where Deanna Young sat with her parents.

Three days earlier, the now-famous 13-year-old had turned her parents, Bobby and Judith Young, in to Tustin police, accusing them of using drugs in the family’s cul-de-sac home. The parents subsequently were arrested and charged with possession of cocaine. On Friday, the family was reunited for 15 minutes--behind closed doors and in the presence of a social worker.

“The mother and father were very supportive,” said one source close to the case, who asked not to be identified. “The mother was particularly supportive of (Deanna), hugging her, sitting close. But also the dad.

“It apparently went well. You could hear them laughing.”

Earlier Friday in a brief hearing, a Juvenile Court commissioner ordered Deanna Young to remain in the county’s protective custody pending further investigation by the county Social Services Department.

Later, Deanna was taken the few hundred yards back to Orangewood, the county’s shelter for abused, abandoned and dependent children in the same county compound, hidden from media cameras.

But Commissioner Betty Farrell did give Lois Cherness, the county social worker assigned to the case, authority to release the teen-ager to the custody of a responsible adult--possibly even her parents--within the next three weeks.

And it is possible, according to Susan O’Brien, the court-appointed attorney representing Deanna, that Bobby and Judith Young could be granted custody of their daughter. The parents were slipped into and out of the five-story Juvenile Court building Friday and were not made available to the media.

“It is highly unlikely” that the youngster would be released from the shelter over the weekend, O’Brien said after the custody hearing, adding: ‘She’s going to be there a long time.”

O’Brien said several people have offered to care for the blonde, blue-eyed teen-ager temporarily, but that she did not know if they were relatives, friends or strangers.

One thing was very clear, O’Brien and Bob Theemling, Orangewood’s director, said Friday: Deanna wants to go home.

“She’s fine. She’s just fine. She told me I could tell you that she loves her parents and she’s holding up well,” O’Brien told at least two dozen reporters in the Juvenile Court lobby.

O’Brien, who was appointed to represent Deanna in the custody proceedings, would not comment on the demeanor of the parents or her client during the detention hearing.

But she said: “She’s a 13-year-old girl, acting like a 13-year-old girl. She’s worried about how she looks, her makeup.”

Farrell and other court officials would not comment on any testimony given during the hearing, which O’Brien said lasted only five or 10 minutes. They would not say what arguments, if any, attorneys for each parent made.

But some people involved with the daughter and the investigation said they believe that--other than the cocaine possession charges--Deanna and her parents had a good relationship.

On Thursday, Judith Young was allowed to visit her daughter at Orangewood, one source said, adding that the mother was sneaked into the sprawling facility through a back door. That visit, the source said, was emotional but went well.

Earlier in the week, after Deanna had shown up at the Tustin police station with a trash bag containing cocaine estimated to be worth $2,800 if sold on the street, the teen-ager told an officer that her father hit her in the face a few weeks ago.

However, Tustin Police Capt. Fred Wakefield said Friday that investigators quickly determined that it had been “a single incident” and that “there was no sign at all that this was an abusive family.”

Officers who searched the Youngs’ middle-class home found loving notes hanging on the refrigerator that had been exchanged between parents and daughter.

“It was a pretty decent relationship in the family between them all, it seemed to us,” Wakefield said. “. . . It seemed like a pretty happy family.”

Theemling said that, “based on the way her story’s been so far, it sounds like this was actually a pretty close family.

“I think she wants to go home. I think she’s a typical 13-year-old who wants to go home to her parents and get on with being a 13-year-old again.”

The overriding concern in deciding who will have custody of Deanna, he added, is “what is the safe thing for the child.”

Times staff writers Gary Jarlson and Mark Landsbaum contributed to this story.