Sunday, April 24, 2022

RIP Ame Deal

Finding the Girl in the Box: As Ame Deal's Living Hell Ended, It Began for Police Officer

It was a case that decimated a family, shocked a city, haunted hard-nosed cops, helped overhaul a broken child-welfare system, and consumed legal teams for six years. It made executioners of stand-in parents, turned a little girl into a prisoner, and a prisoner into a corpse. Her tormenters, in turn, became the prisoners of the state, and now the condemned.

Yet the case began like so many others: an emergency call to something seemingly very different.

Police Officer Albert Salaiz was the first to respond to the call of an injured child in southwest Phoenix.

Salaiz had joined the Phoenix Police Department in 2000 after a long career in the Air Force, flying politicians to Europe. He was working patrol again, after a stint on a squad that took on violent crime syndicates That morning, July 12, 2011, Salaiz left the Estrella Mountain precinct to tell county prosecutors what he knew about a high-profile home invasion involving rival drug gangs, a big shootout and gangsters posing as SWAT teams.

Then came the injured-child call. Salaiz was a couple of blocks away, so he went. How could he not? A child in danger. On his beat. All the natural instincts of a veteran cop kicked in.

Albert Salaiz, shown here at another date in his Phoenix PD patrol car, was the first police officer on the scene the day Ame Deal was found murdered.

Courtesy Albert Salaiz

When he got there, Salaiz instantly recognized the house. He’d been there a week or two earlier to respond to reports of kids throwing rocks. He’d seen a large gaggle of children there.

This time, he sprinted from his patrol car to the front door. Just when he reached it, the door suddenly swung open and a Rottweiler charged him. He thought the dog was sure to bite him.

He remembers a woman telling him “Don’t shoot the dog!” The dog backed down.

Salaiz’s adrenaline was pumping. It didn’t strike him until later: The woman was more concerned about the dog that the hurt child he was there to help.

He vaulted a wall and rounded a corner.

That’s when he saw her.

A girl was prone on a carpet in the garage, curled up with her legs near her chest. She had “claw-like hands,” Salaiz recalled.

“Then it hit me. I knew this girl,” he said.

“I never, to this day, will forget what she looked like. That image is ingrained on my mind.”

He’d seen her on the rock-throwing call earlier.

And he already knew she was dead. You just know.

But what Officer Salaiz didn’t know that morning was that Ame Deal’s life ended before it began. She never was granted any real chance to live.

Ame Deal was found dead on July 12, 2011, two weeks shy of her 11th birthday.

She suffocated in a padlocked plastic storage box, soaked in her own urine and sweat.

The last of her killers was sentenced Thursday in Courtroom 5A in Maricopa County Superior Court. John Allen will join his wife, Sammantha, on death row. The Allens are the first married couple in Arizona sentenced to death.

The Allens had turned Ame’s prison into her tomb. With Thursday’s verdict, Ame’s death has entombed the Allens in state prison. Salaiz remains a prisoner to his memories.

In a sense, the Allens themselves had been trapped by a violent, domineering, insular household, with four children when they were just 22 years old. Later, John Allen would tearfully tell the sentencing judge he was sorry and the death was an accident.

Already, three other family members were serving prison sentences from 10 to 24 years for their roles in the torment of Ame, who came to be remembered as "the girl in the box."

The brief and hellish life of Ame Deal was recounted over six years in police and news reports, in court records and action.

“In my entire career, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a worse case,” Judge Erin O’Brien Otis said during Thursday’s court action, admonishing John Allen. “This was one of the most unnecessary deaths of a child I’ve ever seen.”

The girl who wound up in that box was born on July 24, 2000, in Pennsylvania to David and Shirley Deal. It was their third child but, despite legal documents to the contrary, David Deal insisted the girl was not his.

By the time the couple ended up in Texas with David’s large, roving, extended family, Shirley couldn’t take the stress and abuse in the chaotic home anymore. She abandoned her daughter.

The Deals continued to bounce around the country. They stayed for a time in Minnesota, Utah, and different parts of Arizona. Always in the poor parts of town. Always schooled at home. Always keeping to themselves. Always leery of new members of the family. Always disciplining the gaggle of children in their own special way.

In Utah, the state investigated the family for possible child abuse. Those suspicions didn’t follow the family to Arizona.

By the time the Deals replanted themselves in a house near Broadway Road and 35th Avenue, Ame’s cousin Sammantha Allen was caring for her. It was Sammantha’s 20th home in 18 years. She had never gotten past fourth grade.

She took all her cues from her mother, Cynthia Stoltzmann, who was Ame’s legal guardian.

“Her world was small and very isolated and it was dominated by her family,” said her defense attorney, John Curry. “That’s all she knew. That’s all she knew.”

Sammantha knew discipline was a fact of life. And it was harsh. But that’s how you grew up. So when Ame came along, nobody in the house questioned her punishment.

Punishment is the wrong word for it. It came from a wooden paddle named “butt-buster.” Or routine belt lashings. Or when the family made Ame walk barefoot for 15 minutes on the pavement in 114-degree heat, until neighbors saw the fright flash in Ame's blue eyes. Or when John Allen made her put her hands and feet on the floor and arch her back unnaturally for three hours at a time.

When she complained it hurt and collapsed, he’d lift her into the arch again.

Family disciplinarians sometimes made Ame eat hot sauce, but she got used it. So they forced her to eat dog feces.

Ame was treated differently from the half-dozen other kids in the fetid, overcrowded house. Other kids were put in a small chair for a timeout; Ame was sent to the storage box.

The box was a plastic locker 31-by-12-by-14 inches. It had latches to secure the lid. As Ame neared her 11th birthday, she stood just 48 inches tall.

On July 11, 2011, someone in the house said Ame had gone to the freezer and taken a Popsicle without permission.

When the Allens crammed Ame in the box, nobody thought twice. Everybody knew, family members later told police, “Ame lies. Ame steals. Ame needs to be punished.”

Ame weighed less than 60 pounds. She was hungry. She didn’t get the same food the others got. She wasn’t one of their own. Not one of the tribe. Not deserving.

And besides, Ame had been in the box many times before. John Allen would roll and throw the box around with Ame locked inside. Sometimes they’d throw the box, Ame and all, into the swimming pool. Other times, Cynthia Stoltzmann would sit on it while Ame whimpered inside.

The night of July 11, the Allens stuffed Ame into the locker and snapped down the latches.

She’d been known to push on the lid with her feet to get air. The only airways were some small holes under the handles. Otherwise, it was airtight. They put the box in the garage where there was no air-conditioning. The mercury never dipped below 95 that night.

Sammantha warned her husband that the girl could escape. John went to a gate in the back yard, grabbed a padlock, locked the box, and took the key.

The couple had planned to go to bed and check on Ame in an hour. They didn’t.

“I just didn’t get up,” John later told police interrogators.

He could have saved Ame’s life, but it meant so little to him he never had a reason for killing her, county prosecutor Jeannette Gallagher would later explain in court.

The morning after the padlocking, around 8 a.m., when the family went to take Ame out of the box, she wasn't moving. She wasn't breathing.

About half an hour later, someone called 911.

Officer Salaiz was the first cop on the scene. He and other police officers and firefighters arrived to a house that reeked of urine. Used tampons and cockroaches littered the floors. Salaiz doesn’t remember the filth and stench, only what he saw first.

Ame lay on a blue carpet next a wet urine stain. Her lips were the color of the carpet. Her skin was starting to discolor. Her body was twisted unnaturally in the position of a kid play-acting like a dead dog.

Ame wasn’t acting. She was dead.

And treated worse than any junkyard mongrel. Her body was already stiffening. It looked like one of those body casts of ancient Pompeii residents buried in ash. It looked like she’d been trying to push the lid off her plastic coffin.

Salaiz remembers John Allen standing above Ame as a woman tried CPR. Somebody was talking about a hide-and-seek game gone awry. The girl had locked herself in the box. Herself.

Not much later, Salaiz’s sergeant rolled up and asked him what happened.

“I told my supervisor, ‘They fucking killed her.’ He got pissed. ‘You can’t be saying that. You don’t know that for a fact,’ ” Salaiz recalled.

He went to get an initial statement from John Allen, who sat on a swing, acting “like nothing happened.”

Allen said he and his wife went to bed at 1 a.m. as Ame, a 12-year-old and his 3-year-old daughter played hide-and-seek. The next morning they found Ame in the box, dead. The story struck Salaiz as odd. A 3-year-old playing hide and seek at 1 a.m.? Not likely.

Odder still was Allen’s demeanor.

“The was no emotion from him or the grandma, either. That’s what bothered me. There was no emotion,” Salaiz said. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

He had been a cop 11 years.

He went to hear the 12-year-old’s story. She was a few doors down the street. As he walked toward it, Cynthia Stoltzmann walked toward him.

“She said, ‘Yeah, they found Ame dead,’ and she keeps walking past me,” Salaiz recalled.

He didn’t think at the time: How could she know that Ame was dead, minutes after paramedics declared it?

The 12-year-old had the look of a scolded child who didn’t want to be there, and really didn’t want to talk. She stood, stiff as board, never looking Salaiz in the eye, as he asked her what happened.

She told the same story, except for one detail. She went to bed at 9.

“I felt the 12-year-old ... knew what happened. She knew about the box,” Salaiz said.

The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Ame died of asphyxiation, after suffering heat exhaustion and dehydration. Forensic investigators with the office ruled it a homicide.

But long before those results, on the morning Ame died, John Allen wrote out his thoughts in a spiral notebook.

“Ame found passed away in box. They (the kids) were playing hide-and-go-seek. We believe she fell asleep and suffocated,” he wrote.