The Girl In The Box☑️

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In a sense, the Allens themselves had been trapped by a violent, domineering, insular household, with four children when they were just twenty-two years old.

Later, John Allen would tearfully tell the sentencing judge he was sorry and the death was an accident.

“She had claw-like hands” Salaiz recalled “I never to this day, will forget what she looked like, that image is ingrained in my mind”

“In my entire career, I can't say I've ever seen a worse case” Judge Erin O'Brien Otis said during thursday's court action, admonishing John Allen “this was one of the most unnecessary deaths of a child I've ever seen”

Within days of Ame's death, as the horrors emerged, public outrage erupted, people demanded to know why nobody had protected Ame, how no one in the state child-welfare agency knew what went on in that squalid house, where twenty-four lived at once.

Officer Salaiz, riddled by guilt, played the events through his increasingly troubled mind. He had been to the house days before to check out a report of those unruly kids in the neighborhood.

An investigator said to him;

"When you went to that house a week earlier, please tell me it wasn't a child-protection call, or that she was being abused"

State law makes it a crime for a person in authority not to report child abuse. By now, all the cracks in the child welfare system had gaped open and the public was clamoring for better protection of vulnerable kids.

“I'm going through my mind, why didn't I see something? Why didn't I notice something? I beat myself up, you have no idea, that was my area that I patrolled everyday” Salaiz said

He changed, he was no longer the happy-go-lucky cop who loved his job and never had disciplinary trouble. Now he was distraught, morose and everyone saw it, he sought counseling.

"That case changed my life, it took some of the joy out of life for me” Salaiz said

When a bad injury and unsuccessful surgeries ended his police career, he took medical retirement three years after Ame's death.

“I wasn't the same person, I'm still not. I'd wake up and say what's my purpose, why am I here?” He said “I failed”

With thursday's verdict, Ame's death has entombed the Allens in state prison, Salaiz remains a prisoner to his memories.

Salaiz was not the only one who felt the pain of Ame's torture and death, her case became a lightning rod for everything that was wrong with Arizona's crippled, overburdened child-welfare systems.

The state launched investigations, legislators wrote dozen of bills, found millions of dollars, and overhauled the agency.

Justice for Ame came slower, one by one, juries found her relatives guilty and judges sent them to prison.

First came David Deal, Ame's father... Ten years for attempted child abuse

Then came Cynthia Stoltzmann... Twenty-four years for child abuse

Then Judith Deal, Ame's grandmother who got ten years for the same.

Sammantha Allen went on trial in July 2017. In august, she received the first death sentence for a woman in Maricopa county since Wendy Andriano who was convicted in 2004 of first degree murder.

John Allen's trial began in November. Prosecutors displayed images of Ame's twisted corpse on court room screens for up to forty minutes during trial.

Jurors weighing the guilt of Allen could barely peel their eyes from it at times, it haunted them, as the memory haunted Salaiz.

The taped confessions lay at the heart of the case against and for Allen at trial. His defense attorney, Rob Reinhardt, said the statements showed a man who didn't hide.

“I'm not going to tap dance around John's statements, you saw the video, you read the transcripts, there was no screaming or beating a confession out of him, John accepted responsibilities for his actions” Reinhardt said in his summation.

He asked jurors to ponder whether Allen was only guilty of negligence or recklessness, insufficient to convinct him of murder.

Prosecutor Jeanette Gallagher painted a very different portrait as she rolled Ame's plastic prison around the court room and displayed Ame's disfigured, discoloured corpse on the court room screens.

She questioned why Allen had the padlock if he didn't know he'd committed a crime. She asked the jury of ten women and two men why he'd told Sammantha he was planning to turn himself in if there was no crime. How, she mused, did Allen know Ame suffocated weeks before the autopsy results?

Salaiz, was among those who testified, the prosecutors showed him the picture, that picture and he broke down. He had never erased the image of Ame's distorted figure, but he'd faced down his torment.

"When I came out of that court room, it felt like a ton of bricks had been lifted, I didn't have to think about this anymore, I'd done my duty” He said.

The jurors did their duty quickly, they deliberated fewer than twenty four hours before finding Allen guilty on all counts.

During the trial, they never looked at him and he never looked at them.

On thursday afternoon, Allen entered the court room, flashed a brief half smile to his family, and sat at the defense table. Then jurors filed into the court room, stone-faced.

Ame's family, present through much of the trial, was not there for the final act.

Within five minutes, it was all over. Jurors unanimously confirmed their finding that John Michael Allen deserved the death penalty. Allen and his family members began sobbing, shaking and blubbering, Allen told the court he was sorry and that Ame's death had been an accident.

Nobody wept for Ame on thursday

But Gallagher and her team embraced, tightly. They had sent five family members to prison, two of them to death row. They had ended a six year legal ordeal, a torment of its own to many.

Prosecutors had achieved justice at last for Ame and her mother, Shirley Deal

"The death penalty is too good and too easy for you, I want you to suffer till death” Shirley Deal wrote of Ame's tormentors in 2013 “the only thing you deserve is where you are going when you leave this earth”

The last of her killers was sentenced on thursday in court room 5A in Maricopa county superior court. John Allen will join his wife, Sammantha, on death row. The Allens are the first married couple in Arizona sentenced to death.

Ame came to be remembered as:

"The girl in the box "

The brief and hellish life of Ame Deal was recounted over six years in police and news reports, in court records and action.

For officer Salaiz, the outcome left more conflicted emotions

“I'm overjoyed that they were convicted because that's what they deserve for what they did to that little girl but I'm distraught my testimony puts two people to death” He said “do I have sympathy for them? I don't, because of what they did”

"Here I am, the cop who first arrived on the scene, who knows exactly what happened, who knows they are monsters. I should be doing cartwheels, because not only did they destroy Ame's life, and her family's life, they destroyed my life, they made it hell for six years"

Ame's living hell lasted almost twice that long!

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