THE 'RIGHT THING' TEARS AT A FAMILY

King County Youth Who Turned In Dad On Drug Charges Struggles With Consequences

Trever Palmer, 17, says he felt nervous and slightly heroic the night he
picked up the phone, dialed 911 and informed the King County Sheriff's
Office that his father was growing marijuana.

Minutes later, when Aaron Palmer, a Covington computer programmer, returned
home from an evening of swimming laps at the local pool, deputies arrested
him. They later found more than a dozen marijuana plants growing in a
hidden room in the garage and booked the single father of three into the
King County Jail on drug charges.

Two months later, as Trever Palmer prepares for his last year of high
school, the 140-pound wrestler is still grappling with the consequences of
his actions and talked about them in an interview yesterday. Although
police lauded him for doing the right thing, he says half his relatives are
mad at him. He's "found out who my friends really are" while trying to
avoid Kentwood High School classmates who scorned him, calling him "a
weasel" and names much worse than that.

Palmer made the 911 call largely because of a lesson he learned in a Junior
ROTC ethics course: "Stand up for what you believe in, don't follow the
crowd and be your own person."

He still thinks he did the right thing. "I felt like I was saving my sister
and brother from this guy," he said. "You can only put up with so much."

But his family is torn apart, and his 15-year-old sister may not see the
911 call as such a brave act.

The night her father was taken away, "she really didn't speak much to me,"
Palmer said. "She was crying and trying to get her stuff together." Today,
she "just kind of avoids me," he said.

Palmer said his 7-year-old brother didn't know what was going on. Palmer,
who is spending part of the summer with his grandparents in Pennsylvania,
plans to live with his best friend's family until he graduates and joins
the Air Force. His sister and brother are staying with a cousin. Their
mother, who is divorced from their father, is unemployed and "doesn't have
room for them in her apartment," Palmer said.

Palmer's sister could not be reached last night, and Palmer's father did
not return phone calls. Aaron Palmer, 38, was released on $5,000 bail
shortly after his arrest and pleaded not guilty last week to a felony
charge of drug manufacturing, the South County Journal reported. He faces
up to five years in prison. The boy said many of his relatives can't
comprehend his motives for calling police. "It sucks," Palmer said last
night. "I was really hoping that they would understand. It's kind of like
that hole in (me) that needs to be filled." He has tried to explain himself
to his father's parents, who "kind of understand, but they are upset."

When he called police, he said, he wasn't considering what would happen to
his family. "I kind of figured that would fall into place." What went
through his mind?

"I thought: no guts, no glory," he said. He thought marijuana growing was
taking over his father's life. Instead of spending time doing things with
the family, his father tended to his plants -- moving the pots around and
watering. He said that on two occasions, people visited the house on
account of the marijuana.

Living around drugs is "the part that no kid should have to go through, and
I didn't want (my younger brother) to go through it."

There were other conflicts. He thought his father paid attention to his
sister's accomplishments, while ignoring his own. And he thought his ROTC
courses, which were based on Marine Corps leadership training, put him at
odds with his ex-Army father "on different military perspectives." The
"stand-up" message from his ROTC course echoed in his head. "That set it
straight, why I should do it," Palmer said. "For one thing, it's illegal."
He said another factor was the emotions stirred by reading "The Red Badge
of Courage" for an English class. He said he was impressed by how a
character in the book, a soldier named Nick, discovered his own bravery.
"He stood up for what he believed in," Palmer said.