Growing Up to Face the Challenge : Courts: With Juvenile Hall and probation behind him for killing his pedophiliac guardian in Dana Point, Joeri DeBeer faces a legal obstacle to his American dream: a deportation hearing.

Joeri DeBeer gave the socket wrench one final turn, then stood back to admire the gold-trimmed license plate he had just mounted on the back of his brand new Toyota Celica GTS.

“That looks awesome,” said DeBeer, who sports a severe flat-top haircut and wears one small gold earring. “God, I have good taste.”

The license plate echoed his view: B NVIOUS.

How times have changed for DeBeer, the Dutch youth who, in 1985, when he was a scared, skinny 17-year-old too confused and ashamed to tell authorities that he was being molested by his pedophiliac guardian, put a bullet through the head of his tormentor and then burned his body and their Dana Point condominium. Now 22, with a manslaughter conviction, 14 months in Juvenile Hall and three years of probation behind him, he has grown into a hulking, hard-working, fiercely independent and sometimes cocky young man eager and ready to join the ranks of normal American society.

He shares an immaculate, two-bedroom home with his fiancee, Pat Nguyen, a 20-year-old Amerasian immigrant, and her mother, in a suburban East Bay community about 25 miles from Oakland. The young couple operate a minor entrepreneurial empire that keeps them awake 18 hours a day and on a steady diet of No-Doz. DeBeer, 6-feet-2 and 215 pounds, plans on becoming a police officer and is already training his prized Rottweiler, Jake, hoping that the two of them can join up together as a team.

Few couples their age are as industrious, or as dedicated to establishing financial independence.

“Ten years from now, I want to have a nice house, a nice car, and a big fat bank account,” DeBeer said in an interview last week. “It’s not just materialism. We expect a lot out of life, and if you want to get ahead, you have to keep wanting more.”

But standing between DeBeer and his dream is a final legal obstacle: a deportation hearing before an immigration judge on Jan. 18 in San Francisco. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and particularly San Francisco District Director David N. Ilchert, have zealously pursued DeBeer’s deportation since 1986, disregarding the sexual abuse that DeBeer suffered, appeals for leniency from the judge and jurors in his criminal trial and DeBeer’s own remarkable strides toward becoming a productive member of his community.

“If he butchers and barbecues and buries another human being, is he of good moral character?” Ilchert once said about DeBeer. “The kid’s got no business being in the United States. They can reform him in his native land.”

Ilchert and other INS officials declined to comment on his upcoming hearing. “Our position is that it’s now in the hands of the immigration judge,” INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said.

The INS’s obsession with DeBeer is puzzling to former DeBeer jurors such as Patricia de Carion, who has maintained the closest contact with him.

“He is not a menace to society,” de Carion said. “Joeri made a mistake, and he knows it. But in the process, Joeri has helped protect an unknown number of boys from ever being molested by (guardian Philip A.) Parsons again. . . . They’re not looking at molestation in the way the jurors did . . . and they’re not stopping to realize that an American with a history of child molestation brought this Dutch youth to the United States. This is home. It frightens him to think about going back to Holland.”

DeBeer was 13 years old, living in Saudi Arabia with his mother and stepfather, when he met Parsons, a Bechtel Corp. electrician whose first conviction for child molestation was at the age of 17 in 1952.

DeBeer, whose parents had gone through a bitter divorce a few years earlier, was told by his mother that his father, Arie Rietveld, was a womanizer who preferred to spend money on his girlfriends than provide for his family. (DeBeer took his stepfather’s name when his mother remarried, but in immigration files he is still Joeri Rietveld.)

Parsons told DeBeer’s mother that he would take the youth back to the United States with him and further his promising motocross racing career. His mother agreed. Parsons and DeBeer moved to Brentwood in Northern California, then later to Dana Point.

DeBeer, who still says that he “cared for Phil Parsons a lot,” remembers that Parsons gave him things that few other teen-agers had, but also demanded much, much more.

“I had 11 dirt bikes, and how many kids have even one?” DeBeer said. “I had a brand new Z-28, and a 1965 Mustang, a classic.”

In the final months before his death, Parsons was demanding that DeBeer have sex with him before he went to school each morning. DeBeer told psychiatrists and investigators after the slaying that he had tried to stop it, but that Parsons said he would either have to “do things my way or go back to Holland.”

DeBeer’s grades at Dana Hills High School plummeted, his motocross racing suffered, and his self-confidence hit bottom. About a week before the killing, DeBeer’s mother visited him, but the 17-year-old boy was unable to tell her what was happening to him.

One psychiatrist who examined DeBeer said his inability to break free of Parsons’ control the week his mother visited was the final crisis that led him to kill the man.

On April 9, 1985, DeBeer shot Parsons with a gun he had borrowed from a friend after Parsons persisted in demanding sex despite DeBeer’s resistance. Then he drove the body to Riverside County, poured gasoline on it, and set it ablaze.

After Parsons’ history of molestation came out at DeBeer’s trial in 1986--Parsons’ own brother testified about his behavior, as did a 10-year-old boy who was also one of his victims--a jury found DeBeer guilty of manslaughter, but recommended lenient sentencing. Heeding their advice, Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald gave him three years’ probation, plus the 14 months he had already served in Juvenile Hall.

Free at last, DeBeer went back to Northern California to live with a family he knew through motocross racing. But the situation was not ideal; while DeBeer needed some guidance, he was also 18 years old and finally out from under the thumb of Parsons and Juvenile Hall. He did what many teen-agers do: rebel and assert their independence.

He got a passel of speeding tickets and had his license suspended for about a year. He violated probation by visiting an old girlfriend who testified for the prosecution at his trial, and he was warned on more than one occasion to stay away from high school-age girls. He argued at times with his foster family.

Finally, about a year and a half later, he moved out and lived on his own, and almost immediately thrived on the challenge.

“I never made my own decisions--they were always made for me,” DeBeer said. “I’d grown up and wanted to do my own thing. It’s something that most people my age go through.”

It was also about that time that he met Nguyen, the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier, in a class at Diablo Valley College. Soon after they started dating, DeBeer sold his car to pay the deposit on an apartment, and he moved in with Nguyen and her mother.

“She’s my best friend,” DeBeer said. “We fight sometimes, but mostly we get along really well. All our friends said it would never last, and now we just rub it in their faces.”

De Carion, a North Tustin resident who has become something of a mother figure to him, said the pair complement each other well. “They’re probably light years ahead of other people their age, given all that they’ve been through,” she said. “Pat is very self-reliant, she’s a good balance for him. . . . Joeri’s very supportive of her, he wants her to finish school.”

As he was getting his life back on track, though, the INS was resolutely trying to deport him. In October, 1986, the immigration service arrested DeBeer and held him in jail for three days before de Carion posted his $5,000 bail. A month later, an immigration judge ordered him deported.

Last April, DeBeer’s appeal was rejected, and he was ordered to report to the INS’s San Francisco office for deportation. At the last minute, however, DeBeer’s immigration attorney, John Alcorn, won another appeal and succeeded in reopening the case.

The new--and what should be his final--hearing will decide whether he will be deported and barred from the country for at least five years or allowed to leave the country briefly under more lenient terms, marry Nguyen and return to settle here.

Alcorn, whose office is in Laguna Hills, is optimistic that this time he will prevail, bringing the years of DeBeer’s courtroom appearances to a happy conclusion.

“Four years ago, I thought the chances of winning were very, very small,” Alcorn said. “Now, I think my chances of losing are very, very small. A decision by the judge deporting Joeri would not only be wrong, but also inhumane and cruel, and I don’t think he’ll do it.”

What has changed in that time is that the INS no longer may use DeBeer’s manslaughter conviction--considered a crime of “moral turpitude”--as grounds for his deportation. Last summer, after DeBeer had completed his probation, a Contra Costa County Superior Court judge dismissed the charge against him and allowed him to enter a plea of not guilty, granting DeBeer the benefit of his rehabilitation.

Now, the only charge the INS can bring against DeBeer is that he violated the terms of his original student visa--a charge that Alcorn concedes is true, since DeBeer no longer is a student. But that is rarely cause for deportation.

Instead, said Alcorn, the INS almost always allows aliens to leave under a procedure called “voluntary departure,” which carries with it none of the opprobrium of deportation.

If DeBeer is granted the privilege of voluntary departure, he would leave for the Netherlands with Nguyen when she becomes a naturalized citizen later this year, marry her, and then return to the United States as her husband.

The couple have been engaged for nearly three years, but marrying now would complicate DeBeer’s immigration problems considerably, so Alcorn has counseled them to wait.

“The day after she gets a passport, I want them on a plane to Holland,” Alcorn said.

Despite their uncertain status, DeBeer and Nguyen have managed to fashion an extraordinarily busy and rewarding life together.

Their day begins about 1 a.m., when the pair load their five dogs into two vans and set off on what DeBeer proudly says is “the biggest paper route in the East Bay area.” They spend the next five hours delivering 1,500 newspapers--the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Ramon Valley Times--finish the morning off by letting the dogs out for a run--”sometimes we have to take a head count,” DeBeer says--and then head back home for a few hours sleep.

They are up again about 10 o’clock, with Nguyen heading off either for a waitressing job or classes at Cal State Hayward, where she earned mostly A’s last semester. DeBeer drives her to school or work, then heads to a planned community where he and Nguyen have a contract to clean swimming pools, bathrooms and other public areas.

“These are stupid little jobs, but we make a lot more money than people might think,” said DeBeer, sweeping out a bathroom and wiping down a mirror in a matter of minutes. “That’s $11 I made just now--how many people do you know who make $11 just like that?”

While DeBeer is quite proud of his financial success, he is also itching to move on to something more meaningful.

“The best thing that can happen to you on a paper route is that you get a new customer,” DeBeer said.

But until his immigration status changes, DeBeer cannot get a job on his own. The newspaper routes and pool-cleaning contract are in Nguyen’s name, and DeBeer helps do the work.

“He’s getting tired of trying to keep himself busy,” de Carion said. “I think he wants to prove to his jurors, his judge, his attorneys, his family in Holland--with whom he maintains little contact--that he is a good person. . . . He wants to say he’s got a Social Security number and a job.”

Indeed, like a reformed smoker, DeBeer, who once hung out with a crowd of not terribly ambitious teen-agers, considers being unemployed practically a crime.

“Look at that guy,” DeBeer said in a disgusted voice as he drove through his neighborhood, pointing at an acquaintance. “He’s got a Social Security number, he’s an American citizen, and he doesn’t have a job.”

When DeBeer is not working, or shuttling his fiancee to school or to her job, he is likely to be caring for or training one of his three Rottweilers--Keisha, Jake, or puppy Hans (DeBeer also picked up a stray golden retriever, Nike, and Nguyen has a poodle named Chanel that somehow survives among the giants). Two nights a week, he hops in his van with one or two of the dogs and drives 75 miles to Davis for guard dog training.

Given his experience with adults, it is no real surprise that DeBeer has surrounded himself with powerful, loyal animals that he considers his most trusted companions.

“I love dogs. I can rely on a dog more than a person,” said DeBeer, who would like to begin a dog-training business soon. “Dogs have flaws, just like people do. . . . But with dogs, when you’ve been gone for a minute and then come back, they act like you’ve been gone for a year.”

Like many other 22-year-olds experiencing some form of success for the first time, DeBeer sometimes exudes cockiness. One minute, he boasts that the INS “can’t touch me.” Or he will rattle off the monthly payments needed for the ski boat he wants to buy.

But it is a cockiness that is as transparent as it is shallow.

“He has sort of an arrogant way about him, but it’s really a cover-up,” de Carion said. “He feels proud that through it all, he’s been able to maintain a nice home. . . . For him to say he’s got material things--that’s all he’s been able to do up until now, and it’s success for him. . . . He’s grateful for what everyone’s done for him--both he and Pat thank me all the time.”

DeBeer is also quick to admit that he made a mistake in killing Parsons, rather than seeking help.

“I know that now. But I also read his criminal record, and it was this thick,” said DeBeer, holding his fingers 3 inches apart. “He should never have been set free.”