It was WFAA-Channel 8 reporter Vince Patton who called Beamon to tell her she could pick up her son.
James McGoon/People Weekly
Jan and Chris Beamon and Mark Morton want to move out of tiny Ponder. Harsh economics won't allow them.
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The night before, her lawyer, Bill Short, had asked whether he could contact the television stations.
"I'll run down I-35 naked if you can get Chris out," Beamon responded.
Publicity seemed to work. Isaacks dropped the charges. With Judge Whitten out of town at a judicial conference, her colleague Garcia, who typically doesn't handle juvenile matters, signed the order releasing Chris. A pack of reporters met Jan Beamon as she walked into the detention center to retrieve her son. Then they all trooped over to Taco Bell, where Chris ordered the bean burrito he'd been craving in jail.
Beamon says Chris bided his time in jail reading his Bible. She also says he hurt his knuckle when he got into a fight with a bigger kid in the showers.
"How does she know that?" Chris asks, looking up angrily at his mom when a reporter inquires about the injury. She brushes him off.
Jan Beamon says it took intense press scrutiny to get the D.A. and the court to re-examine their decisions. In some ways, though, school officials have managed to dodge their share of the blame for the Beamon fiasco. "If those kids really felt threatened, shouldn't they have asked Chris to apologize to them? And if they really worry he has psychological problems, why didn't they have him visit a school counselor?" Beamon asks.
Her lawyer is still talking about suing, even though legal precedents firmly establish the judge's and D.A.'s immunity. It's a different story for those at the school and the sheriff's office who may have been involved in the creation of the probable-cause affidavit, a document that is not available to the media in a juvenile case. Any misrepresentations on their part open up lawsuit possibilities.
But Denton County Sheriff Weldon Lucas, whose deputy took Chris to the detention center, says despite all the judge's and D.A.'s remarks to the contrary, he doubts the document was misleading. He wouldn't reveal who signed it.
Toby Crow, a deputy sheriff who Jan Beamon says played a role in the investigation, said his attorney had instructed him not to comment.
For the Beamons, life is forever changed. Working fewer hours so she can homeschool, Jan Beamon consequently has less money. She has received some cruel letters about her son, as well as some supportive notes. A woman who claimed to be the mother of an infant wrote a note scolding her about child-rearing.
"I'm thinking," says Beamon, "call me in 12 years. Wait until he gets a mouth and a mind."
Chris, for his part, is sour. Asked whether he really wants to see the children named in his story get their heads chopped off -- which is what happens in his work of fiction -- Chris doesn't hesitate.
"Now I do," he says.
Editor's note: Judge Darlene Whitten and Denton County District Attorney Bruce Isaacks have sued theDallas Observer for publishing a satirical story on the Beamon incident that chronicled the implausible plight of a fictitious 6-year-old girl jailed for writing a book report onWhere the Wild Things Are. The story included fictitious quotations attributed to Judge Whitten, Isaacks, and others.
