A Phoenix man was convicted of first-degree murder Wednesday in the 2011 death of a 10-year-old girl who was locked in a storage box in sweltering summer heat as punishment for stealing ice pops.
John Michael Allen was found guilty of child abuse in the killing of Ame Deal by a jury in Maricopa County Superior Court.
Jurors now must determine whether the killing was especially cruel or heinous before moving onto the sentencing phase, which could include the death penalty.
Allen’s 28-year-old wife Sammantha Allen, a cousin of Deal’s, was convicted of murder in the girl’s death in June and she now is on Arizona’s death row.
Authorities said the couple forced Ame into the small, plastic box as punishment for stealing ice pops.
Guilty: John Michael Allen (left) was convicted of first-degree murder Wednesday in the 2011 death of Ame Deal (right), a 10-year-old girl who was locked in a storage box in sweltering summer heat as punishment for stealing ice pops
Allen’s 28-year-old wife Sammantha Allen (left) , a cousin of Deal’s, was convicted of murder in the girl’s death in June and she now is on Arizona’s death row. The little girl is pictured right in 2003
Authorities said the couple forced Ame into the small, plastic box (above in court as evidence) as punishment for stealing ice pops. They then went to sleep and the girl was found dead the next morning
They then went to sleep and the girl was found dead the next morning.
Defense attorney Robert Reinhardt had argued that 29-year-old John Allen, a father of four young children, did not intend for the girl to die and that the other adults in the home created the abusive environment.
Ame’s death was the culmination of a shocking history of abuse at the hands of relatives who were charged with caring for her.
Authorities said the girl was forced to eat dog feces, crush aluminum cans barefoot, consume hot sauce and get in the storage box on other occasions.
She also was kicked in the face, beaten with a wooden paddle and forcibly dunked after being thrown in a cold swimming pool, according to police investigators.
Three other relatives are in prison serving sentences for abusing Ame. Ame’s legal guardian at the time of her death was her aunt, Cynthia Stoltzmann (left), who is serving a 24-year prison sentence. Ame’s grandmother, Judith Deal (right), is serving 10 years
Adults at the home originally claimed Ame hid during a late-night game of hide-and-seek and wasn’t found until hours later.
Three other relatives are in prison serving sentences for abusing Ame.
David Deal, who is listed as the girl’s father on her birth certificate, is serving a 14-year sentence after pleading guilty to attempted child abuse.
Ame’s legal guardian at the time of her death was her aunt, Cynthia Stoltzmann, who is serving a 24-year prison sentence for a child abuse conviction.
Ame’s grandmother, Judith Deal, is serving 10 years for child abuse.
Ame’s mother, Shirley Deal, left the family years earlier after suffering abuse from relatives and moved to Kansas without her daughter.
Ame lived in a trash-strewn house in south Phoenix with at least 10 adults and a dozen children
Ame’s mother, Shirley Deal (together above), left the family years earlier after suffering abuse from relatives and moved to Kansas without her daughter. In 2012 she said she wanted the death penalty for all of them
Her mother told AZCentral in 2012 that she tried to get her daughter back years prior, but the family would move every time she tracked them down.
‘I want the death penalty on all of them,’ she said then.
The young girl was one of at least a dozen kids being brought up in the three-bedroom house, along with at least 10 adults.
Many neighbors reported hearing screaming from the house but none told police as they did not want to break the family apart.
The children would roam the streets outside the home until the early hours and they often had little or no clothes on, sometimes wearing no diaper or shoes, they said.
Ame was the child singled out for torture, however, a witness told authorities.
Child welfare authorities in Arizona said they didn’t receive any reports of abuse before her death. But child welfare reports from Utah, where the family lived before moving to Phoenix, listed Ame as an abused child, police said.
The other children in the house were placed with state Child Protective Services after Ame’s death.