With Trial Well Past, Future Brightening for Joeri Debeer

Joeri DeBeer is setting his sights high and not looking back.

Three weeks before his 21st birthday, the Netherlands native is engaged, attending college, playing basketball on a neighborhood team and anxiously awaiting the chance to become an American citizen.

All this is a long way from 3 years ago and DeBeer’s murder trial for shooting his guardian and setting the body on fire.

Jurors in that trial heard that Phillip Parsons, a convicted child molester, had persuaded DeBeer to leave his mother and stepfather, then living in Saudi Arabia, when he was 13, by promising to make the youth a motocross racing champion. In 1985, DeBeer testified, after years of abuse, he killed Parsons, 51, when his guardian again tried to sexually assault him.

The jury reluctantly found DeBeer guilty and then pleaded with the judge for leniency. Jurors offered to take DeBeer into their homes, and offered him money to start his life over. A northern California couple, Syd and Jenny Ward of Oakley, acquaintances of DeBeer through his motocross races with their son, offered to be the youth’s new guardian family.

After a year and a half with the Wards, DeBeer decided to move out.

“Too many decisions were being made for me” at the Wards, he said. “Jenny Ward is a great lady and did a lot for me, but I was 19 and making mistakes, and in order for me to learn I had to be on my own. I had no idea where I was going to go or how I was going to make it, but I had to find out.”

DeBeer’s move took him from Oakley to Antioch and Concord, where he stayed with friends for a few weeks at a time while continuing to take classes at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill. It was in a philosophy class there that DeBeer met his fiancee, Pat Nguyen, 19, the daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant and an American soldier who had left the family in Vietnam before the war was over.

At first, DeBeer said, Nguyen’s mother disapproved of him.

“Pat is half Vietnamese and half American. And at first her family didn’t accept me because I wasn’t Vietnamese or anything, but after awhile they got to know me and thought I was OK,” he said.

For the past year, DeBeer, Nguyen and her mother have lived in a two-bedroom apartment in San Ramon, a small city outside San Jose. DeBeer sold his car to pay the first and last months’ rent, and Nguyen’s mother pays the monthly rent.

DeBeer, a 6-foot, 2-inch blond with a diamond stud earring in his left ear, is studying African history, anthropology and computer science and is considering a career in business and computers.

Although money for the trio is tight, they manage, DeBeer said. His college tuition and some of his other costs are paid by Patricia de Carion, one of the jurors in his trial.

“Pat’s been basically like a mother to me,” he said. “If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be in the position I am now. She really gives me a lot of courage to hang on.” De Carion has been filling a scrapbook with every picture and letter she has received from DeBeer and newspaper clippings about him.

“I told Joeri a long time ago that I would never let him down, and I don’t intend to break that promise,” she said. “He’s struggling financially because he can’t get work, but hopefully the bill will pass.”

A bill introduced in Congress by Sen. Pete Wilson in 1987 would allow DeBeer to apply for U.S. citizenship. Currently he can’t apply because a federal immigration judge has ordered him deported for violating his student visa by leaving the country for a fishing trip off Mexico and for Parsons’ slaying, a “crime of moral turpitude.” That order has been appealed, but Wilson’s bill would override it. Without a green card, DeBeer cannot get a job.

“From time to time you just stop and think, ‘When is this going to happen?” DeBeer said about becoming a citizen. “At times I want to give up, but then I keep hoping and praying that one day I’ll get a phone call that says, ‘Guess what? Pick up your green card and get a job.’ ”

In the meantime, DeBeer attends counseling sessions as part of his probation, which ends in June. He also keeps busy with the Hoopsters, his neighborhood basketball team, playing with his three dogs--a rottweiler, golden retriever and poodle--going to college and spending time with Nguyen.

“The way I look at life, Pat’s probably the best thing that happened to me besides being released,” DeBeer said. “It’s almost like a fairy-tale story. We’re around each other almost 24 hours a day and it only gets better.”

DeBeer said he and Nguyen will marry next summer if they have enough money.

“I’m only getting married once, and I want it to be perfect,” he said.