Baby-Faced Fugitive Finds Sanctuary

Blessed with a boyish face, a 31-year-old fugitive on the run from forgery and theft charges took refuge in the classrooms and hallways of his high school alma mater.

Michael Backman, Grant High School class of ‘86, has pretended to be a 17-year-old senior there since September, taking a full slate of classes including government, global studies, Spanish and geometry, police said.

The charade came to an end Wednesday when a detective acting on an anonymous tip interrupted choir practice to take him into custody.

“I introduced myself and told him I wanted some help in identifying someone,” said Sgt. Mike Hefley. “I opened up the 1986 high school yearbook and pointed to a picture of him.

“His reaction was one of shock. He knew and we knew.”

Backman was jailed on outstanding theft, forgery and parole violation charges from Oregon, Washington and California.

“According to him, he wanted to start over and try to get an education and continue to college,” the detective said.

At Grant High, which gained fame as the setting of the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” the fugitive was known as Deandre Deangelo, a transfer student from tony Beverly Hills High School.

At 5-foot-10, 150 pounds, with short-cropped hair and an unlined face, Backman had no problem passing himself off as a teenager, although students say they had their suspicions.

“The main thing that tipped us off was he kept talking about how hard it was to get into school,” said 16-year-old Will Maxie, an economics classmate who also knew Backman from choir.

School officials said Backman was accompanied by a woman, as yet unidentified, who posed as his legal guardian.

They came with sealed envelopes of documents, embossed with the Beverly Hills High logo and realistic-looking signatures, indicating Deangelo was a star basketball player with a grade-point average of 3.94, ranking him fifth in his junior class.

“This was not ‘I’ll go to Kinko’s, make a transcript and try to hand it in,”’ said school district spokesman Lew Frederick. “It looked as authentic as you can have a transcript.”

Backman apparently did justice to his faked transcript. In a glass case next to the school office, Deandre Deangelo still tops off a list of honor students pulling down a 3.5 or higher grade point average.

“He was like one of us, but he didn’t seem to be struggling in school,” Maxie said. “He’s the kind of guy who handed in his reports two weeks early.”

Frederick said Backman was a popular student who sang in the A Cappella Choir, following up on his real-life high school experience when he was a member of the school’s elite Royal Blues singing group.

Backman, aka Deangelo, was by all appearances a friendly, popular student. Police were still investigating whether he had relationships with any of the students, particularly underage girls740294658and if he committed any crimes while in school.

But Frederick said it was clear the fugitive student was getting money from somewhere, pointing to his new red Chevrolet Camaro still parked on campus. “Twenty-two thousand, I hear,” he said.

Backman came to the school after being paroled in August from a California prison, where he served seven months on a larceny conviction.

He was known as Tracey Adante Ross in California, and there was no indication authorities there knew of his outstanding warrants on theft and forgery charges in Oregon and Washington.

There was also no indication any students or teachers were aware of Backman’s true identity. He looked much different when he first attended high school, appearing younger than his years even then, with a long, bushy hairdo.

Detective Hefley said the anonymous tip that led to the arrest was just crazy enough to be true. “I thought it was strange, so I checked it out,” he said.