Donates $15,000 to Shelter : DeBeer Won’t Keep Funds Inherited from Dead Man

Joeri DeBeer, convicted of killing the legal guardian who had molested him for years, donated more than $15,000 he had inherited from the dead man to Orange County’s shelter for abused children Thursday.

“I told him he could accept this money and no one would know,” Gary L. Proctor, DeBeer’s attorney, said Thursday at a press conference in Santa Ana.

‘Bad Experience’

But his five years of living with Phillip Allen Parsons were “too much of a bad experience” to accept the windfall, DeBeer, a 19-year-old native of the Netherlands, said Thursday at the county Hall of Administration.

DeBeer said he would rather see the money used to help abused children at Orangewood, the county’s emergency shelter for abandoned and abused children in Orange. Reserved and serious during the 30-minute ceremony and briefing, DeBeer handed a $15,322 check to James McNamara, a member of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation board of directors.

The money was DeBeer’s share of Parsons’ pension and profit-sharing account with the Bechtel Corp., Proctor said.

Although persons convicted of voluntary manslaughter in California are not entitled to inheritance money under the probate code section of state law, the Santa Ana-based lawyer said pension and profit-sharing money is governed by federal laws.

Action Researched

“Bechtel did the (legal) research and found it could release the money (to DeBeer),” Proctor said.

DeBeer was 13 when he met Parsons, an electrician, in Saudi Arabia, where DeBeer was living with his mother and stepfather. Parsons obtained the mother’s permission to bring her son to the United States and to sponsor him in competitive motorcycle racing.

Parsons later became the boy’s legal guardian.

On May 21, 1986, an Orange County Superior Court jury convicted DeBeer of voluntary manslaughter for shooting the 51-year-old Parsons with a borrowed gun in their Dana Point home, then taking his body to Riverside County, where he set it on fire on April 9, 1985.

The same jurors, however, appealed for leniency for DeBeer, and spoke on his behalf at his sentencing, asking the judge to grant probation. Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald sentenced the youth to three years of probation and 14 months in juvenile hall, time he had already served while awaiting trial.

Deportation Ordered

A federal immigration judge has since ordered DeBeer deported for violating his student visa and for “crimes of moral turpitude.”

That order has been appealed. Proctor said Thursday that a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), which would grant DeBeer permanent residency, went to a Senate subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization this week. Proctor said it may take up to a year before an appeal is heard, but if the bill is passed by Congress, it would invalidate the deportation order.

DeBeer now lives with his court-appointed guardians, Syd and Jenny Ward, in the Northern California community of Oakley. He is attending Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, where he has studied English, philosophy and law.

After his ordeal with Parsons, the killing and the trial, DeBeer said he wants to get on with his life.

“I’m free, I’m healthy and I’m loved,” he said.