On average, 4,700 children are on formal probation each month in New Mexico. Across a year, about 1,000 kids find themselves locked up in a corrections facility. Many turn their lives around. But for some, like Arnell, years in and out of the juvenile justice system fail to prevent the horrific - in this case, a beating death and a numbing sentence.
By Tim Archuleta
Tribune Reporter
CLOVIS - Arnell Van Duyne, only days old, sat contentedly in a baby swing.
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Arnell
Age: 16.
Hometown: Clovis.
A child's life: Arnell Van Duyne had been through probation, court-ordered psychological evaluations and even a one-year sentence to the Boys School in Springer. But the state juvenile system could not keep him from becoming a murderer. He was convicted late last year of brutally killing his adoptive mother. As state inmate No. 56106, he'll be eligible for parole when most start collecting Social Security benefits.
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Proudly, someone grabbed the instant camera and snapped baby Arnell's picture.
Pasted to the photo in simple print was a regal proclamation: "Born To Win Gold."
There will never be gold. Not for Arnell.
At age 16, this boy's life is, by most standards, worthless.
Arnell has seen to that.
He used a baseball bat last summer to murder Norma Young, his adoptive mother, as six day care children watched in the backroom of a neat, yellow-brick Clovis home.
A disturbing crime. A disturbing boy.
In a Curry County courtroom in late November, a state district judge, acting on behalf of the state of New Mexico, turned this boy into a man: a 16-year-old adult sentenced to life in prison.
All Arnell, who pleaded guilty without a trial, could do was apologize. And cry.
"Whether I spend the rest of my life in the pen or not, it hurts me to know that I did this, too," said Arnell, his teary voice marked by a country accent familiar on the plains of eastern New Mexico.
Arnell stands out as a horrific failure of the state's juvenile justice system - one that handles 27,000 delinquency referrals a year.
While most children who enter the juvenile system turn their lives around, it's cases like Arnell's that cost the state in terms of money, safety, psyche.
There was a chance to save Arnell. He was 13 the first time he was arrested, and he took every juvenile reform step the state has to offer. Teen Court. Intensive out-patient counseling. Boys School.
Somehow, the juvenile justice system missed the indicators that Arnell would murder.
Few cases end as tragically, but Arnell's saga does illustrate the struggle the juvenile system faces in keeping 16-year-olds from being lost to crime.
For many, the loss is permanent.
Take Arnell.
"He'll be in prison more than 50 years, if not his whole life," says Assistant Public Defender James G. Wilson, Arnell's attorney.
Those who know Arnell don't even bother trying to explain why he viciously murdered a woman who defended and doted on him.
Most say this: Talk to Arnell.
But Arnell doesn't want to talk.
Asked for help in understanding his life, he refused an interview, writing back:
"No. I can't help you. And I will never be able to help you.
"Sincerely, Arnell Van Duyne."
Toby Jorrin/Tribune
CAPTURED: Arnell Van Duyne is escorted by law enforcement officials in Channing, Texas, after his arrest in the death of his adoptive mother in Clovis. Arnell's various encounters with the juvenile justice system began with his first arrest at 13.
All Norma Young wanted from Arnell on that summer day was a little help around the house.
Arnell was still settling in after spending about six months at the the New Mexico Boys School in Springer. And Young, family members say, was ecstatic that he was back.
Young, who with her husband adopted Arnell about 15 months earlier, had pestered authorities to let her son out early after he stole the family car and then violated his probation by running away.
It was a day after the Fourth of July, the middle of the workweek, when Young asked Arnell to do a simple chore - move a dresser and put some clothes away.
Here is Arnell's account to detectives:
Young lets Arnell know she is unhappy that he has left some clothes on the floor.
Arnell sulks and sits on his twin bed. An aluminum bat rests nearby against the wall.
He sits there and thinks about it for 20 to 30 minutes and becomes angry.
Arnell goes to a family room, where five children sit on a bed. A 10-day-old girl rests in a car seat on the floor.
Young, who provides home child care for Cannon Air Force Base personnel, sits in an easy chair. Her feet rest on a footstool.
Arnell comes up behind her and takes "a home run swing." He hits Young in the back of the head.
Young turns around. Arnell hears her say, ~~"No, Arnell. No."
Arnell hits Young at least four or five more times. His final blow: a golf-club-type swing that crushes one of Young's eyes.
Arnell sees and hears the children "screaming and freaking out." Some "are just in shock, just looking at me. They can't believe what I'm doing," Arnell says.
As the children run from the room, Arnell heads for the utility room and gets some nylon cable ties.
Arnell binds Young's arms behind her back and drags her to his room. He cuts her clothes off with a knife.
Arnell volunteers a final, grisly detail: "I was going to knock me off some of that," street slang for having sex.
Investigators said they wanted to charge Arnell with raping Young but never could figure out whether the sexual attack came before or after Young was dead.
Around 2:30 that afternoon, Young's 16-year-old biological son finds his mother - naked and dead.
Toby Jorrin/Tribune
AWFUL MEMORIES: Paul Young pauses in the hallway of his Clovis home, near the room where 16-year-old Arnell Van Duyne killed Young's wife, Norma, in front of six children in day care. Young now finds himself trying to sort through the pain of what happened on July 5, 2001. "I feel sorry for him, but we opened our hearts, our home," Young says.
Paul Young learns his wife is dead when he is in front of their house. He is so distraught that he can't speak to police.
His neat home, across the street from a park with castle-shaped playthings and a fishing pond, is thick with detectives.
Gone is Norma, a woman whose memory triggers a warm, loving giggle from her husband.
To this day, Paul Young wonders how his sense of trust, and a boy he loved, could have betrayed him.
"Arnell was interacting really well," Young says. "I watched him real close. Sometimes, he didn't know I was watching him."
Arnell was 12 when he was welcomed into the Youngs' home as a foster care child in early 1998. In May 1999, Arnell's biological mother, who lives in Roswell, relinquished her parental rights to the state Children, Youth and Families Department.
Paul Young remembers the conversation with his wife about making Arnell their son.
"We decided, poor guy, he needs a home," Young says. "Norma said, `Paul, let's adopt him.' I said, `OK.'"
The Youngs agreed to the adoption on March 23, 2000.
Arnell told the sentencing judge this past fall that there were lots of good times. And Young remembers a few himself. Fishing trips. Family parties. Church services.
"Arnell cried when he got baptized," Young says.
During the murder investigation, detectives said they never turned up any real problems at the Young home. They said Norma Young was a compassionate woman with a gentle way around children. Paul Young was a man in control of his home.
"I feel sorry for him, but we opened our hearts, our home," Young says. "And for him to do it to us, especially to her . . . He knew she cared."
Young says he never considered Arnell dangerous, even though the boy quickly built a juvenile record that started with violence during the last 2 years of the Youngs' care.
Arnell's first arrest came after he got into a fight in middle school in January 1999. Two other battery arrests followed.
Arnell was labeled a delinquent child a year later after stealing carbon dioxide cartridges from a discount store. He was placed on two years' probation.
He was pulled from the Youngs' home and shipped to an Albuquerque juvenile corrections facility for a 15-day evaluation after stealing and wrecking the family car.
Ten months later, Arnell was sent to the New Mexico Boys School for a one-year commitment after running away from home.
The juvenile justice system, however, freed him about five months early, a move that Norma Young welcomed but that Paul Young says he was never comfortable with.
But Arnell, he says, was never disrespectful to him or his wife.
"He called her Mrs. Norma," Young says.
But Arnell's heart wasn't always with his new mom and dad.
Once, during a conversation, Young says he learned Arnell missed his biological mother.
"You could see it. He was hurt, likely lonely," Young says. "I thought, he would snap out of it and be with us."
Toby Jorrin/Tribune
A LAST MONUMENT: Norma Young, lauded for her love of children and those in need, was buried in a Clovis cemetery.
In Arnell's mind, Roswell was home. He arrived there at age 3 in the temporary custody of an aunt and uncle.
He was born April 4, 1985, in Albany, N.Y., to Blendell Van Duyne and Purnell Parson.
Arnell never really knew his biological father. Parson was slain while working as a security guard, shot in the head during a grocery store robbery.
Arnell was 2.
Around that same time, Blendell Van Duyne says she was serving out a prison sentence in New York on an arson conviction.
After her release, Van Duyne moved to Springfield, Ill., where she agreed to give an aunt and uncle temporary custody of Arnell, and his older brother, Purnell.
The boys were raised on their father's Social Security death benefits checks.
Van Duyne, 37, says she allowed the boys to go along with the aunt and uncle with a promise: "I told them I'd meet up. And I did."
She adamantly denies claims in state records that she abandoned Arnell.
Van Duyne says she did rejoin her sons in Roswell. Arnell was 4 or 5.
Van Duyne says she went to work rebuilding her relationship with her sons.
"It was a normal thing, but they just didn't stay with me all the time," says Van Duyne, a mother of seven.
When it came to Arnell, Van Duyne says she always knew "something was wrong."
"Arnell was a troubled child," Van Duyne says. "He liked knives, weapons and fire."
Arnell's behavior would only get worse.
And the mother the state claims abandoned her son says she was the first to recognize that Arnell was disturbed.
Before the state of New Mexico officially gave Arnell a new mom and dad, his biological mother did try her hand at raising him.
Arnell was 11 when he moved into Van Duyne's old military house in south Roswell full time.
It was eight months of mind-blowing hell.
"It started out not good," Van Duyne says. "That very first night I said, `Something smells like it's burning." He had started his room on fire. I said, `What is wrong?'"
The coming days and weeks were just as troubling.
One afternoon, Van Duyne says, Arnell took condoms from her bedroom and strewed them outside his bedroom window. On another occasion, Arnell spit and flicked "green boogers" all over his bedroom door.
"I asked what is this?" Van Duyne says. "His older brother said, ~`Arnell calls that his booger collection.'
"How in the hell could I deal with him?" Van Duyne asks. "I could never figure him out."
Arnell's behavior, she says, was also abusive behind closed doors.
Van Duyne said she learned from two younger sons, ages 3 and 4, that Arnell was using one of his half brothers for oral sex.
"That's when Arnell got put out," Van Duyne says. "The eight months was over. Arnell had to go."
Toby Jorrin/Tribune
A BROKEN FAMILY: Blendell Van Duyne (right), Arnell Van Duyne's biological mother, helps sons Purnell (left), 18, and Kendell Neal Thompson, 7, to an afternoon snack in their Roswell home. Blendell Van Duyne says she never abandoned Arnell but knew he had to leave when one of her younger sons told her that Arnell was sexually abusing him. Van Duyne says Arnell needed intensive behavioral health treatment when the state placed him in foster care.
The state of New Mexico is Arnell's parent again.
After the murder, Paul Young relinquished his parental rights to Arnell, now inmate No. 56106.
A devastated Young questions how the state of New Mexico could allow his family to adopt such a child.
By law, the state is required to reveal what it knows about a child's past to the adoptive parents. A spokeswoman for the Children, Youth and Families Department says that was done in Arnell's case.
But Young says he had no idea Arnell had such serious behavioral problems.
What state youth officials knew about Arnell before the adoption remains a secret, locked away behind the state Children's Code's confidentiality laws.
But it's clear the Children, Youth and Families Department was aware of Arnell's problems after the adoption proceedings began.
A few months before the adoption was approved by a judge, a diagnostic/psychological evaluation revealed the scope of Arnell's problems.
Arnell was evaluated in November 2000 at a state juvenile facility in Albuquerque. The evaluation states Arnell "agrees he is a walking time bomb."
A diagnostician found Arnell was "defensive, easily agitated and tense . . . at times, combative."
Arnell, the report says, could be described as "potentially explosive and quick to respond physically."
Arnell, the diagnostician concluded, is emotionally calloused, traumatized and aggressive.
"The emotional trauma experienced by Arnell is deep-seated and not likely to dissipate without professional therapeutic intervention," the report warns.
That information was never shared with the Youngs. About eight months later, Arnell murdered Norma Young.
Romaine Serna, the Children, Youth and Families Department spokeswoman, says the evaluations are prepared for the judges, not the parents. Arnell's report was stamped "confidential."
Arnell's murder could end up costing New Mexico taxpayers dearly. Young wants to sue the state for placing Arnell in his home.
Curry County District Attorney Randall Harris calls the whole situation an ugly "mess."
But he says he doesn't buy the "abuse excuse," calling Arnell "a frightening person."
"A lot of kids get adopted. A lot of kids get abused," he says. "But there is no correlation between that and murder. Period."
Arnell, who wanted to grow up to be a firefighter, now must adjust to adult prison life.
He was moved Jan. 22 to a privately run prison in Hobbs, after a brief evaluation at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas.
He and Blendell Van Duyne remain in contact. Sometimes he writes, calling her "Momma." Sometimes he returns her letters and family photos.
"We love him," Blendell Van Duyne says.
Arnell's baby snapshot today remains part of the collection of family photos hanging near the front door of Van Duyne's home.
Back in Clovis, some 100 miles away, Harris, a hard-nosed prosecutor, says there is a part of him that grieves for Arnell.
"I'm a person. I'm a parent, too." he says. "It's a sad day in New Mexico when we have a 16-year-old who has the ability to throw away, not only the life of his adoptive mother, but his own life.
"Do I feel sorry for him? Absolutely. Do I pray for him? I do."
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