Deanna Maran dared to protect others with tragic results
The Santa Monica High School sophomore murdered two months ago felt her reputation as protector so strongly, her family and friends dubbed her “Daring Deanna.”
The night Deanna Maran was fatally stabbed, the urge to protect fell upon her shoulders once again.
In an interview with the Daily Press, Deanna’s mother, Harriet, and her father, Ilja, spoke publicly about the death of their 15-year-old daughter, who was attacked, allegedly by a 17-year-old girl and her sister, at a party while dozens of people looked on.
Deanna told teachers two years ago in an eighth grade essay that she felt pressure to protect people. Her friends had come to rely on her to fight their battles. That’s how she won her nickname, “Daring Deanna,” — a 5-foot-7-inch athlete who wasn’t afraid to call it like she saw it.
“One of the first things that popped into my mind was what she had written. It was Deanna trying to do the right thing and it really struck me that it was the type of thing that could have happened at a party like that,” said Cristina Everett, Deanna’s eighth grade language arts teacher at John Adams Middle School. “She was feeling growing pressure that her friends were using her either to protect them or to get close to all of her friends who were boys.”
“She was increasingly uncomfortable with being in that position,” she added.
Harriet said her family always joked about Deanna’s no-nonsense demeanor.
“If she is mad, you better stay away,” she said.
There had been previous warnings for Deanna to keep to herself. Two weeks before her death, Deanna was hit in the face by a teenager at a West LA bus stop after she warned him to stop harassing one of her male friends.
But on Nov. 17, Deanna’s courage and convictions weren’t enough to save her. She had been taught since childhood that fear creates victims. The lesson turned out to be a sad twist of fate.
Her fatal struggle came after she confronted a girl who was breaking potting plants at a party in an upscale Westwood home. Deanna was then allegedly jumped by the girl, her sister and their friends, who then pinned her to the ground, beat her, and stabbed her with a knife.
That children could have done such a deed dumbfounds Deanna’s mother.
“You have these parents that have more than enough means to raise their children but their priorities are all screwed up and twisted,” Harriet said while sitting at her kitchen table, with a box of Krispy Kreme donuts placed in the center, one of Deanna’s favorite snacks.
“To me it’s a tedious fight to try to straighten these kids out to be good adults,” she said. “This is a degenerate society. These kids are on auto pilot.”
“This is a degenerate society. These kids are on auto pilot.”
The Maran children knew that they had to earn their way through life, she said.
“Why are we such an anomaly?” Harriet wondered. “I tried to make them tough in the beginning. I insisted that they be independent. They shouldn’t be coddled and sheltered.”
On the morning of her death, Harriet dropped off Deanna at her piano lessons in Marina Del Rey and Deanna took the bus back with her younger brother, Ilja.
The day leading up to Deanna’s fatal night was typical for her. She spent the afternoon rearranging her room, a standard pastime for a teenage girl. She didn’t mention the party that Saturday night to her parents.
“She had gotten so many calls that night,” Harriet said. Deanna nonchalantly slipped it in when Harriet was cooking dinner. Deanna deflected many of the standard questions a mother would ask: “Who are you going with? Where is it? What’s the phone number? You have to work at the Firehouse tomorrow!”
Deanna dodged her mother’s request to stay home for dinner.
“She got me in a good mood and started dancing and all the goofy stuff she does,” Harriet said. Before she could press the issue, Deanna said, “I gotta go, my ride is here!”
Those were the last words Harriet would ever hear from her youngest daughter, affectionately known as “Lala.”
“At about 11 p.m., I started thinking, ‘Now where is this Lala? She should have left a number.’ I went up to her room, checked the bed, but no sign of Lala,” she recounted, adding that Deanna’s curfew was midnight. Harriet jotted down a few notes, scolding Deanna for taking off without leaving any information and a list of consequences she would face when she returned home.
About a half hour later, Harriet and Ilja got the call every parent fears most. Hospital officials told Ilja their daughter had been stabbed. By the time they arrived at Santa Monica Hospital, their daughter was already dead.
When they returned from the hospital, Harriet looked at what she wrote to her daughter and tore up the notes in disgust.
The next day, the Marans walked around in a daze. They couldn’t eat or sleep. Deanna’s three sisters, all of whom lived in Northern California, had to be tracked down and told the news.
Meanwhile, questions with no answers nagged at her parents.
“She was only 15. I am very surprised that she touched so many people.” — — HARRIET MARAN Victim’s mother — IRIS EARLY Victim’s friend — HARRIET MARAN
How could dozens of onlookers watch as Deanna was pinned down, continuously punched and kicked, then fatally stabbed with a knife? Why didn’t any one use a cell phone to call for help?
The Marans heard a series of conflicting stories about what happened at the party, which was hosted by a boy Deanna had never met before. The Maran family was forced to sort out reality from high school gossip. What became clear, however, was that in the apparent desire to watch a “cat fight,” no one jumped to Deanna’s defense. Many said later they didn’t realize how seriously she had been hurt.
“My girl is dead for their entertainment,” her father, Ilja, said.
Deanna’s friends tried to explain to her parents why they didn’t intervene but it wasn’t enough.
“I didn’t want to hear their lame excuses,” Harriet said. “For nothing, my girl died.”
By some eyewitness accounts, college boys at the party held back the crowd and told anyone who broke through the line that “they’d kick their ass.”
Police refused to comment because the incident remains under investigation.
“Nobody stopped to save my Lala,” Harriet said. “Maybe they didn’t realize it was a fatal wound.”
Iris Early, Deanna’s friend since the sixth grade, had become much closer to Deanna in the past year, as they were both on the volleyball team and were sophomores at Santa Monica High School. Early, who did not attend the party where Deanna was killed, also relied on Deanna’s fearlessness.
“Like, I’m not that aggressive, so when anyone would pick on me or hassled me, she would always stand up and say ‘That’s not OK,’” said the 16-year-old, adding she still visits Deanna’s house where she and dozens of other friends hung out. “It’s kind of hard because just talking to her sister, they are so much alike, they have the same body movements, it’s hard for me.”
Deanna comes from a line of high achieving sisters, but the teen-ager hadn’t figured out what she would do later in life.
“I think she would have been a writer,” Harriet said, adding after Deanna’s death she discovered many poems and letters she had never seen. “I think she had a natural talent. She had a knack for telling a story.”
Harriet placed a poem at a shrine outside of their home that Deanna had written to her boyfriend, Mike, also 15, that she isn’t sure he had ever seen.
Deanna’s older sister, Claudia, known as “Boopsie,” a 19-year-old college student who recently moved home from the University of California-Berkeley, has moved into Deanna’s room. The room has become a sort of rite of passage for the Maran girls — it was occupied first by the oldest sister, Amika, 27, known as “Bing Bing,” and then by Bianca, 21, known as “Chi Chi” and then Claudia and then Deanna — the last girl left in the house.
Harriet, a Filipino, and Ilja, a Czech Republic immigrant, kept their family close knit by reminding their children of where they came from. As part of Filipino tradition, all family members are referred to by nicknames. The Maran’s only son, Ilja, 10, is sometimes referred to as “Ne Ne.” Harriet has been known as “Nining” since she was a child and Ilja, Deanna’s dad, is sometimes referred to as “Ta Ta,” which means father in Filipino.
Deanna wrote letters and talked to her sisters frequently, sounding off to them about how she was the last Maran girl left at home with her little brother — everybody else had gone off to college.
Harriet recounted many stories of the family having fun together with Deanna right there in the middle of the jokes. But Deanna was a bit more of a challenge than the rest of her children because of her spiritedness.
“She was a handful out of all of my kids,” she said.
The dining room buffet at the Maran home is cluttered with pictures of Deanna with her friends, her sisters, her parents and as a child. A glass-encased box holds her treasured volleyball that is covered with farewell messages from SAMOHI teammates. Some of her friends have placed Deanna’s favorite things at the outdoor shrine.
The Maran house is quieter now. The silly, beautifully vibrant, fun-loving girl, and her entourage of boyfriends and girl-friends don’t come traipsing through the house any more.
Early said Deanna’s character was the reason she ended up being one of her best friends.
“A lot of being in high school is being superficial and Deanna wasn’t like that,” she said. “She was so amazing all around... Everything I did it was with her.”
“A lot of being in high school is being superficial and Deanna wasn’t like that.”
Her former teacher, Everett, remembered Deanna as a typical teen-ager, but unique too.
“She was more intent in going with what was right,” she said. “It made her an interesting kid. She had a very strong physical presence and definitely had a good sense of herself.”
Like her parents, Deanna was animated. On the way to piano lessons the morning she died, Deanna screamed and waved her hands outside the car because she spotted her volleyball coach across the street.
“She was making a fool of herself, she always did that, she didn’t care,” Harriet said. “She actually was a clown and she made fun of herself. She would squeeze her chin and say she had her dad’s ‘butt chin.’”
Deanna was the conspirator of a long-running joke on their next door neighbor, Julian, who is the same age. He had a crush on her older sister Bianca, but it was Deanna who liked him. For years, she wrote love letters to Julian and signed them as if Bianca had written them. He later realized the joked being played on him and said at her Nov. 26 memorial that now he realized he picked the wrong sister to have a crush on.
“She was only 15,” Harriet said. “I am very surprised that she touched so many people.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 18, 2002. Read the original PDF.