Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : AT THE SCENE : 13-Year-Old Girl Informs on Parents, Alleging That They Use Drugs in Home

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 sheriff’s deputy 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, the blond, 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, Judith Ann Young, 37, and father, Bobby Dale Young, 49, 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.”

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

On Friday, the family was reunited for 15 minutes--behind closed doors and in the presence of a social worker.

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

Later, she was taken the few hundred yards back to Orangewood, hidden from media cameras.