‘I Didn’t Want My Mom or Dad Dying . . . ‘ : Girl, 13, Says She’d Turn In Parents Again

The 13-year-old Tustin girl who made headlines when she turned in her parents to police for drug possession said Thursday that she would do it again.

But she said she has advised other children who are thinking about following her example to “talk with their parents first.”

Deanna Young, a freshman at Tustin High School, spoke in the Santa Ana office of her parents’ attorney after a judge allowed Bobby and Judith Young to enroll in a drug diversion program rather than face charges of cocaine possession.

They are scheduled to return to court May 8 when a judge will review their progress. At that time, the drug possession charges could be dropped. “I’m glad they didn’t get a hard sentence--jail time,” Deanna said later. It was the first time she had discussed the case with reporters.

She said she had not expected her parents to be arrested when she carried a bag containing about an ounce of cocaine and a smaller amount of marijuana into the Tustin police station Aug. 13 and told officers it belonged to her parents.

“I thought the drugs would be taken away and that would be it,” said Deanna, seated next to her mother and father. “I didn’t want them to go to jail.”

The arrests of Bobby Young, a bartender and self-employed contractor, and Judith Young, a clerk in federal bankruptcy court, captured national headlines and prompted at least four other California youths to turn in their parents for alleged drug use or sales.

Deanna said she has corresponded with youngsters who did what she did. “Some of them wrote to me; some of them I wrote to” after reading about their cases, she said. “I wanted to understand how it was for them.”

Some letters were from children who were considering informing on their parents, her father added.

Deanna’s advice to them: “They should talk to their parents and try to solve it with them first.”

Asked about police statements that Deanna had pleaded with her parents to stop using drugs, Deanna said, “It didn’t get me anywhere.”

Talking to reporters outside Orange County Municipal Judge C. Robert Jameson’s courtroom earlier in the day, Bobby Young said he and his wife “didn’t use drugs. We’ve never been seen using drugs; we were charged with drugs in our home.”

Neither the Youngs nor their attorney would discuss what the cocaine was doing in the family’s home.

Deanna turned in her parents after attending an anti-drug lecture by an Orange County sheriff’s deputy Aug. 12 at a Tustin church.

“At first it was really boring. Then I started listening, and I got to thinking about it,” Deanna said Thursday. “The sheriff guy, he kept saying that cocaine could fully kill people. I didn’t want my mom and dad dying from cocaine or anything.”

After the lecture, Deanna said, she went to her home with two girlfriends, and they collected the drugs and “put everything on the counter.”

“We were going to hide it,” Deanna said. “Then we were afraid somebody would find it or we’d get caught with it. We didn’t want to just put it in the gutter, but we didn’t know what to do with it.”

Asked why she changed her mind and took the cocaine to the police station, Deanna said, “I was thinking about it, and I figured nothing would be solved by just throwing it away.” Beside, she said, “that’s where I was taught to go when anything went wrong.”

After her parents were arrested, Deanna was taken to Orangewood, Orange County’s shelter for abused and abandoned children. It was then, she said, that she began to have doubts about whether she should have gone to the police.

Although she liked the employees at Orangewood, Deanna said, there were still “bars on the windows” and fences around the compound, and she missed her family and friends.

During a trip away from the shelter, Deanna ran away from Orangewood, her mother said. She was supposed to meet a member of the Orangewood staff who was returning her to the shelter, but instead she “hopped on the back of a boyfriend’s scooter and away she went,” Judith Young said.

Returned to Parents

Deanna called her parents, and at a hearing the same day a juvenile court referee ordered her released to their custody.

Both parents said Thursday they felt more shock than anger toward their daughter after they were arrested--separately--early Aug. 13. Then, Judith Young said, they worried about where their daughter was and how she felt.

Their landlord asked them to move out of their rented home on a quiet Tustin cul-de-sac, and they said Thursday they were still unpacking boxes at a new home in the same city.

“We wanted to keep Deanna in the same school,” Judith Young said.

The most important of many lessons they have learned the hard way since August, the mother said, was “to keep open communication.”

“Your lives get so hectic and go in so many different directions,” Judith Young said with a sigh. “We need to take a little more time and communicate. I thought that we were. . . . Now we’re more sensitive to each other’s problems.”

Chuckling slightly, her husband added: “We still fight and argue and kiss and make up like everybody else.”

One day after he returned to his job tending bar at a Santa Ana tavern, a long-haired “motorcycle-type guy” wearing leather and “brass knuckles for rings” approached him, Bobby Young said. The man didn’t seem like the “sensitive type,” he said.

“He said, ‘I want to shake your hand; I wish your daughter was here so I could shake hers, too,’ ” Young recalled.

The man said he had two children, 11 and 15 years old, Bobby Young said, and “ ‘since they’ve been 3 or 4 years old, I haven’t been able to talk to them.’ And how now he was going to try. So some good is coming out of it somewhere.”

One thing they won’t have to worry about is whether their daughter will use drugs, Bobby and Judith Young said Thursday.

More of a relief, Bobby Young said, is that they know now their daughter thinks for herself.

“It’s more of a relief (to know that she’ll) do what she believes is right,” he said. “. . . You never know for sure if you’re raising a child properly, and this action affirms that.”

Asked what advice he had for parents, Bobby Young said: “Respect your children.”

And Deanna, with her parents out of jail and the family “much closer” after counseling that stemmed from the much-publicized case, said, “I’d do it again” if it were necessary.