Youth Who Won Jurors Over Faces Deportation

Joeri DeBeer, convicted in Orange County Superior Court of manslaughter for killing the guardian who sexually abused him for years and then released on probation when the jury that convicted him pleaded for leniency, was back before another judge Thursday.

In an extraordinary scene last June, DeBeer received three years’ probation plus the 14 months he had already served in Juvenile Hall after the jurors appeared at his sentencing to appeal for leniency.

Now, he and his new guardians are battling government attempts to deport him.

Thursday he won a temporary reprieve. San Francisco Immigration Judge James Vandello agreed to postpone deportation hearings until Nov. 20. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has charged that DeBeer, 18, is in violation of his non-immigrant student status for committing “crimes of moral turpitude.”

The youth is appearing in U.S. Immigration Court under the name Joeri Rietveld, his real father’s family name. DeBeer is his stepfather’s name.

John R. Alcorn, an Irvine immigration attorney representing DeBeer, said after the hearing that he hopes during the 30-day stay to convince the INS to withdraw the deportation order on “humanitarian grounds.”

INS agents confiscated DeBeer’s passport at his guardian’s home Sept. 30. One day later, DeBeer surrendered to the INS office in San Francisco, where he was arrested and later charged with being in the country illegally.

DeBeer was released from Oakland City Jail on Oct. 3 when Patricia de Carion, one of the jurors who convicted him, put up the $5,000 bail bond to secure his release.

David N. Ilchert, INS district director in San Francisco, said Thursday that he has “no lack of compunction in proceeding against this boy. He’s committed horrible crimes.”

On April 9, 1985, DeBeer shot his legal guardian, Phillip A. Parsons, then placed the body in a van and drove to Riverside County, where he doused the body with gasoline and set it afire. He returned to Parson’s Dana Point apartment and also set it on fire. DeBeer said he shot Parsons, a convicted child molester, after Parsons tried to sexually assault him.

Parsons, an electrician, met DeBeer when the youth was 13 and living in Saudi Arabia with his mother and stepfather. Parsons offered to bring the boy to the United States and make a motorcycle racing champion of him. In court, DeBeer testified that once in this country, Parsons began to “use him” sexually four or five times a week.

Sympathetic Jurors

Torn by the boy’s nightmare descriptions of emotional and sexual abuse, sympathetic jurors who had convicted DeBeer of manslaughter in May begged the sentencing judge in June not to send the youth to jail.

Since then, DeBeer said in an interview following Thursday’s hearing, all 12 of the jurors have kept in regular contact with him. De Carion is paying his fees at a community college.

DeBeer is living in Oakley, a small rural community about 60 miles east of San Francisco, with the family of Syd and Jenny Ward, whom he met while racing motorcycles with their sons.

In the interview Thursday, DeBeer described memories of Parsons tinged with bitterness, guilt and confusion.

“I keep asking myself the question: Why did he love me--for myself, or what I am?” he said.

“I was just a kid,” DeBeer said, recalling Parson’s repeated sexual abuse. “You don’t know that what’s going on is crazy and wrong. At that time and at that age you always do what adults tell you to do.

“He could be a real neat guy. I still feel bad about what happened. I haven’t got to the point where I feel I really miss him, but that point will come.”

‘Army Drill Instructor’

Parsons drove the boy hard to succeed at motorcycle racing, said Jenny Ward, who met the electrician at races where Ward’s sons competed. “He was like an Army drill instructor,” she said. “Phil really used to push him, standing alongside the track and yelling. He had a need for Joeri to excel.”

If the INS allows him to stay in the United States, DeBeer said he hopes to finish college and study law at UC Berkeley. “But it’s hard to plan ahead,” he said, “when you’re living one day at a time.”

DeBeer said he has not heard from his real father in more than six years and that he feels estranged from his mother and her family in the Netherlands. If deported, he said, it would be like returning to a foreign country.

DeBeer’s mother and stepfather live in the Netherlands, he said, and his mother visited him once in the United States before his trial. “I felt as if she should have been there for the whole thing,” DeBeer said over coffee. “I’m still hurt and disappointed. I try not to think about it. It bothers me a lot.”

Jenny Ward said that after DeBeer’s release, the youth slept with the family’s golden retriever, Whiskey, in his bed every night. “Joeri needed all the affection he could receive,” she said.

For the first 12 days after his release, DeBeer said he could not eat indoors. “I was finally outside,” he said. “I didn’t like it in (Juvenile Hall). I still can’t stand places with no windows. The whole thing made me claustrophobic.”