Reunion With Informant Teen Sought : Crime: Energy Department official and his wife seek reconciliation with daughter who police say told of pot plants being grown in home.

In a nondescript courthouse outside this city, a former Energy Department official and his wife today hope to engineer an unusual reconciliation.

They want to be reunited with the person who turned them in to police for growing marijuana--the couple’s 16-year-old daughter.

The girl summoned officers--apparently because of hard feelings after being disciplined--and met them at the side door of the family home with photographs of her parents’ indoor garden.

Robert J. Alvarez, 54, and his 55-year-old wife, Kathleen Marie Tucker, both face two felony and two misdemeanor charges for growing marijuana in the basement of their suburban home.

Although Kerry Tucker’s parents were released pending trial, they were ordered to have no contact with their daughter, who is staying with a friend. Arguing that the 16-year-old is “in need of a structured family environment,” Alvarez and Tucker hope to convince a judge today to permit them to regain custody of their daughter.

Experts said that the Tucker-Alvarez case is not unusual. Parents raised in an era of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll are now rearing children raised on zero tolerance for drugs. As a result, more and more kids are turning in their parents.

According to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, known by its acronym of NORML, children regularly report their parents’ recreational drug use, prompted either by school-based anti-drug programs or by fits of adolescent pique.

Just last week, an 11-year-old boy in suburban Jacksonville, Fla., saw his father and stepmother jailed after telling authorities of the couple’s basement cultivation of cannabis. And earlier this year, a 16-year-old upset about moving from New York to Washington tipped police off to the stash of marijuana in his parents’ bedroom.

Even among anti-drug activists, the specter of children ratting on their parents causes some discomfort. One federal official said that debating the issue publicly might taint a legitimate anti-drug message with a far more sensitive and difficult ethical debate: whether children should ever tell on their parents.

Keith Stroup, founder and executive director of NORML, said his organization gets at least one call a month from an attorney or defendant whose child, whether inadvertently or on purpose, has turned in a parent for marijuana use or possession. In almost every case where the child’s revelation was intended, he said, the informant “is either a very naive adolescent who thinks she is saving her family or a spoiled-rotten one who is mad at her parents.”

While he acknowledged that few of the 694,000 people arrested on marijuana-related charges last year went to jail, Stroup said that--when the charges are made by children--family stability can suffer. Alvarez--a nuclear safety expert who was a senior policy advisor to the secretary of Energy--was fired from his job within days of his arrest last week.

The appeal seeking to restore contact between Kerry Tucker and her parents--the centerpiece of today’s hearing--calls the girl “seriously learning disabled and apparently emotionally disabled as well.” Written by her mother’s attorney, it notes that the child’s parents “are fearful that she, if left on her own, will be inclined to discontinue her education.” The girl “has been under the care of family therapists,” the document adds, citing the opinion of one such professional that contact between parents and child should not be “interfered with.”

Neither Alvarez’s nor Tucker’s attorneys would comment on Kerry Tucker’s motivations for turning in her parents. In a statement of charges also on file with the court, a Takoma Park detective testified that Kerry Tucker’s call to police came about 10:41 p.m. Sept. 2 and that the teen “reported a large amount of drugs are inside of her home.” When uniformed officers responded to the call, “they were met by Kerry Tucker,” who “produced photographs” she had taken of her parents’ alleged marijuana plants.

When a police officer entered the Alvarez-Tucker home, saying that he was obliged to “secure and prevent evidence from being lost,” the statement of charges reports that Kathleen Tucker said: “It’s all my fault. I have it for my migraine headaches.”

In an interview, Kathleen Tucker’s attorney, Steven D. Kupferberg, insisted that “what that means is as clear as mud. . . . It certainly didn’t mean that she was culpable.” He did, however, confirm that Mrs. Tucker is “totally disabled from constant migraines and fibromyalgia,” a chronic muscle pain disorder.

Kupferberg said that he is negotiating with the Maryland state attorney to have the charges dropped. “This is a minor case, to say the least, and may have little or no prosecutorial merit,” he said.

Kupferberg, who called Alvarez and Tucker “exemplary parents,” insisted that there is “no animus between parents and child.

“Your blood is forgiven most trespasses. I think things just got out of hand,” he added.