UTAH STATE PRISON — Convicted child killer Steven Ray Allen is standing by his story.
Allen told a member of the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole on Tuesday he believes the jury that convicted him in 1990 failed to consider his account of the events that led to the death of Michael Barrie.
"It's the same as I've said from the beginning," said Allen, 62, when asked to describe how Barrie died.
Allen said he and Barrie, 3, were sitting in a pickup truck outside a Moab store on Dec. 16, 1986, while the boy's mother and older brother went inside to shop for a toy. The toddler was chewing on a piece of caramel candy, Allen said, and tried to exit the truck to follow his mother.
"I grabbed him and pushed him back against the seat, slammed the door and yelled at him," Allen told parole board member Curtis Garner during Allen's first hearing since 1993.
"I think that scared him enough to make him inhale that candy into his windpipe," Allen said. "I thought he was throwing a fit, like he had a habit of doing."
The boy stiffened, his eyes rolled back, and then he fell over in the truck's cab, Allen said, prompting the man to run into the store for the boy's mother and then take the child to the hospital, where Barrie died.
"The difficulty with that is all the other evidence presented at trial," Garner said.
A jury convicted Allen of second-degree felony murder based on evidence presented by prosecutors that he struck and then smothered Barrie out of frustration over the boy's whimpering. Allen was dating the boy's mother at the time. At trial, the woman and others testified that Allen physically abused Barrie repeatedly in the weeks leading up to his death.
"About those people who say I hit and kicked him," Allen said Tuesday, "well, that's what they say."
Three months after Barrie's death, the boy's mother agreed to have her son's body exhumed for an autopsy, prompting Allen to leave Utah. He landed in California, where he shot and killed a man in November 1987 during a dispute over stolen property — a shooting Allen maintains was accidental.
Allen pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the California case, but then disappeared into the mountains along the Idaho-Montana border before being sentenced. He was arrested in those mountains in August 1989 after being profiled on the TV show "America's Most Wanted."
At Tuesday's hearing Allen offered an apology of sorts for Barrie's death, but still blamed the pain inflicted on the boy's family on police and prosecutors.
"I'm really sad over the whole thing," Allen said. "Not sad because of my own circumstance, but sad for the boy and for his mother. If she has ever had to believe that I suffocated the child, then the people who have promoted that story are guilty of making her feel really bad.
"That's the part that I'm really sad about — that they want to punish me so bad that they're willing to inflict that kind of distress on somebody else."
A decision from Allen's parole hearing is expected in November. Should he be granted parole in Utah, Allen will still serve at least 11 years in prison in California for the 1987 slaying there.
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