Happy Ending for Joeri DeBeer, Who Killed His Molester : Immigration: The Dutch youth who fatally shot and burned his guardian after a long history of sexual abuse can marry and eventually become a citizen.

Dutch immigrant Joeri DeBeer, who killed his pedophile guardian in Dana Point in 1985 but was granted leniency by judge and jury, won a major court battle Friday, ending a four-year crusade to deport him and opening the door to U.S. citizenship.

“This feels great,” said DeBeer, 22, after embracing his attorney, John Alcorn, former juror Patricia de Carion and his teary-eyed fiancee, Pat Nguyen.

“A happy ending is now assured,” said Alcorn, who has handled the case without pay since 1986. “Joeri had a much greater faith in me and the American system of justice than I have.”

DeBeer and Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant who just passed her own citizenship exam Wednesday, underwent a 2 1/2-hour hearing before U.S. Immigration Judge Brian H. Simpson gave DeBeer virtually everything he had asked for.

Over the objections of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service attorney Beverly Phillips, Simpson lifted the deportation order against DeBeer and granted him permission to leave the country under a status known as voluntary departure.

While DeBeer must return to Holland within 90 days, he will also be free to marry Nguyen as soon as she is sworn in as a citizen. When that happens, he will be able to return to the United States as a legal permanent resident.

Had the deportation order remained in effect, he could not return to this country for at least five years, even if he married a U.S. citizen.

DeBeer and Nguyen, whose father was an American soldier stationed in Vietnam, have been engaged for more than three years. They share a house in the San Francisco Bay Area community of Dublin, run a newspaper-delivery business and said that they would have married already except for their respective immigration problems.

With the clouds lifted, they plan on a simple marriage ceremony in Holland, then a big wedding in Northern California. DeBeer hopes to become a police officer someday.

“I didn’t know whether to cry out of anger, or cry out of joy,” Nguyen said about the nervous 15 minutes she spent while the judge discussed the pros and cons of the case. “So I just figured I’d cry to be safe.”

DeBeer was 13 years old and living with his mother and stepfather in Saudi Arabia when he met Philip A. Parsons, a Bechtel Corp. engineer who promised to sponsor the boy’s promising motocross career if he could take him back to the United States.

Unaware that Parsons had a 30-year history of sexually abusing young boys, DeBeer’s mother let her son go. Once back in the United States, Parsons drove the boy mercilessly, becoming infuriated when he did not win a race and sometimes ordering him back onto the track before he was fully recovered from injuries.

He also forced DeBeer to have sex with him on a regular basis, sometimes before DeBeer left for school in the morning.

On April 9, 1985, after DeBeer and Parsons had argued over Parsons’ sexual demands, DeBeer shot his tormentor in the head with a borrowed revolver. He then set their Dana Point condominium on fire, took Parsons’ body out to Riverside County and set it ablaze as well.

An Orange County Superior Court jury found DeBeer guilty of manslaughter and arson, but the jurors pleaded for leniency. The judge, noting the panel’s concerns, sentenced him to time already served and three years’ probation.

But while DeBeer tried to rebuild his shattered life in a foster home in Northern California, the INS arrested him and initiated deportation proceedings on the ground that his crimes involved “moral turpitude.”

Voluntary-departure status requires that the applicant display good moral character for the previous five years, and the INS prevailed in initial hearings and appeals by pointing to DeBeer’s criminal convictions.

Then last spring, more than five years after Parsons’ death and with DeBeer’s probation completed, he obtained an expungement of his criminal record along with an appellate ruling that reopened his deportation case.

With the criminal conviction expunged, the only immigration charge against him was having violated the terms of his student visa--a rarely cited ground for deportation.

INS attorney Phillips argued Friday that the serious nature of DeBeer’s crimes should still disqualify him from voluntary-departure status. But four witnesses--his fiancee; de Carion, his former probation officer, David Stoeffler, and his foster mother, Jenny Ward--all testified to DeBeer’s good moral character during the past five years.

Ward’s strong testimony on DeBeer’s behalf was somewhat surprising, if only because she was called as a witness by the INS. She and DeBeer had argued when he left her house in 1987, but he was 19 years old and needed to get out on his own, Ward explained Friday.

At one point, Judge Simpson asked Ward if she knew of any “evil acts” DeBeer had committed since 1985, or if there was anything “inherently bad” about him.

“No, none whatsoever,” she replied.

Nguyen, 20, a student at Cal State Hayward, was also asked by the judge if she thought DeBeer was of good moral character.

“If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t be engaged to be married to him,” she said. Then she was asked about her hopes for the future. “To live a normal life . . . and not have someone knock on the door and take my whole life away.”

INS District Director David N. Ilchert had made DeBeer’s deportation a personal mission the past few years, saying that he “butchered and barbecued” Parsons and did not deserve to stay in the United States.

After Friday’s ruling, though, Ilchert said he would let DeBeer chart his own course.

“So be it, that’s the system,” Ilchert said. “We do not plan to appeal it. The court has spoken.”