DeBeer Gaining in Battle With INS : Deportation fight: The young Dutch native who killed his guardian in Dana Point after being molested is freed of the government’s charge of committing a crime of moral turpitude.

A federal immigration judge in San Francisco Wednesday bolstered Dutch native Joeri DeBeer’s hopes of avoiding deportation by dismissing the government’s charge that DeBeer committed a crime of moral turpitude when he killed his abusive guardian as a teen-ager, according to DeBeer’s attorney.

The judge threw out the charge because DeBeer’s conviction was expunged in March by a Superior Court judge in Contra Costa County.

But the Immigration and Naturalization Service will press on in its effort to deport DeBeer under a second charge, stemming from the expiration of his student visa in 1986.

An attorney for the INS said the agency would not grant him permission to leave the country by “voluntary departure.” That alternative, which is often afforded illegal immigrants whom the Justice Department deems to be “of good moral character” for the previous five years, would ease DeBeer’s efforts to re-enter and settle in the United States in the future, which he says he would want to do if forced to leave.

DeBeer killed his guardian more than five years ago, and his attorney, John Alcorn, says he has shown good moral character since then. But INS San Francisco District Director David N. Ilchert vehemently opposes DeBeer’s being given anything but a deportation order. “The kid’s not Jack Armstrong,” Ilchert said. “If he butchers and barbecues and buries another human being, is he of good moral character?”

Immigration Judge Brian Simpson set DeBeer’s new deportation hearing for Jan. 18. He was originally ordered deported in 1986, but a federal immigration appeals board recently reopened the case.

“This changes the whole picture,” said Alcorn, a Laguna Hills immigration attorney. “The one and only issue will be to determine if Joeri’s of good moral character. I don’t know what on earth the government will come up with.”

DeBeer was convicted in 1986 of voluntary manslaughter for the killing of Phillip Allen Parsons, a child molester who had brought DeBeer to the United States at the age of 13 with the permission of DeBeer’s mother.

At his trial, DeBeer testified that Parsons had molested him repeatedly, until finally, on April 9, 1985, the 17-year-old youth shot Parsons with a borrowed gun, took the body to Riverside County and set it afire with gasoline. Then he returned to their Dana Point apartment and set it on fire.

A sympathetic jury recommended leniency for DeBeer, and he was sentenced to three years’ probation and 14 months in Juvenile Hall, which he had already served awaiting trial.