The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Every day, Doreen would tell Colton to call his mom and see if it was okay that he stayed for dinner. She says he’d pick up the phone, talk for a few moments, hang up, and tell her, “Yeah, it’s fine.” It didn’t take her long, though, to realize he was only pretending to call.

  After dinner, in the lingering Northwest summer evenings when the sun doesn’t hit the horizon until 9 p.m., the kids would head back out to play until bedtime. “It’d get to be eight o’clock, and I’d be, ‘Okay, Colton, it’s time for you to go home.’ He’d say, ‘Okay. I’ll call my mom.’ Well, he was faking that, too, and walking back home.” No one saw the friend of his mom’s who, Colt said, dropped him off every morning, so they began to suspect that that, too, was a fib.

  One evening, time slipped away so smoothly that when Doreen looked up it was 10:30, and Colton was still there. “I said, ‘Well, Colton, the girls need to go to bed, where’s your mom?’ He says, ‘Oh… she can’t pick me up, I’ll just walk.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not. Come on, we’ll give you a ride home.’” Doreen, Dan the pilot, Megan, and Colton piled into the van. “When we got over to the east side of the island, to the bottom of Haven Place,” remembers Doreen, “Colton said, ‘This is my road, this is good, just drop me off here!’ And I said, ‘No, no. I want to make sure you get home okay.’”

  Megan says Colton started freaking out. “He tried to open the door and jump out while the car was moving.” So bam! Dan locked the doors, turned to Colton, and said, “Hey, listen, we don’t care what your house looks like or anything like that, we just want to make sure you get home okay.”

  They pulled into the dark driveway and drove up under the cedars to the clearing. “There’s his mom and a couple guys sitting around the campfire, a case of beer on the picnic table,” says Doreen. “Colton got out and they all started hollering at him, so he just took off running for the mobile home.” Doreen told Megan to stay in the van and she got out and walked up to Pam. “I just said, ‘You know your son’s been spending a lot of time with us. I thought maybe you would want to meet me.’”

  Doreen said she didn’t get much of a response from Pam. “She pretty much blew us off.” After that, Colt didn’t show up for a couple of days.

  Doreen, who’d investigated child abuse as a social worker back in the Black Hills of South Dakota, had just always assumed that Colton was a latchkey kid. “Whenever I’d ask why we hadn’t seen or met his mom, he’d just say, ‘She works,’ or ‘She’s not home.’” Doreen says she hadn’t observed any classic warning signs that he came from a troubled home. “He was always clean, his hair was always buzzed neat, there were no obvious signs of physical abuse. He just seemed like a lonely little kid.”

  “We never saw him with anyone else, no other friends, no other kids,” says Megan.

  The Wagners were all relieved when, on the third day, they walked outside and there was Colton, waiting for them. “He looked embarrassed,” says Megan.

  Doreen took him aside and sat him down. “I said, ‘Look, I’ve seen it all, don’t be ashamed about anything. I just want to make sure you’re safe and that you know you can come to me if there’s anything I can do. He said, ‘Okay,’ and that was it.”

  After seeing his home, Doreen went out and bought Colt sport sandals and some T-shirts. “I thought it was weird that he was always barefoot,” says Megan, laughing, “but I guess that’s what he liked because he wasn’t too excited to get the sandals. He was just like, ‘Oh, thanks,’ and I think he only wore them to make my mom happy.”

  Megan says Colton rarely talked about his home life, “other than one time when I was complaining that I didn’t like my mom’s smoking, and he said he ‘hated!’ when his mom smoked. He was all excited one day because he said he’d just bought a remote control tank off eBay and that it shot BBs. He said he hid in the woods and when his mom came out to smoke he’d fire BBs at her. He thought that was great. I was impressed just because I didn’t even know what eBay was back then and he was two years younger than me and had it figured out. He seemed really smart and actually really mature for his age.”

  Colt also never told Megan his dreams for the future, but she says meeting the family’s private pilot obviously had an impact on him. “Colt told me that he thought Dan’s job was really, really cool,” she says. After getting to know Dan, Colt began telling other kids that his father was not only a pilot, but one who flew rich people all around the world. He also began to tell Pam that when he grew up he was going to become a private pilot for people like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and work for them until he had enough money to start his own aerospace company.

  At the end of that first summer, when the Wagners told him they were leaving for California, Colt was visibly disappointed. They wrote his number next to the phone and Megan promised she’d call as soon as they came back the following year. And she did. Colton again became part of the family, spending practically every glorious Pacific Northwest summer’s day with them, beaching under the ever-blue skies; swimming, boating, and crabbing in the calm waters of Saratoga Passage; playing games well into the evenings; and eating anything and everything that Doreen put in front of him. By then, Colt had already outgrown the sandals Doreen had bought him and he spent the whole time happily barefoot.

  The third summer, the Wagners did more traveling and spent less time at the beach. They lost touch with their island boy. Later, Doreen ran into Colton and Pam at the Elger Bay Store, but she says he acted very uncomfortable, like he didn’t want her to talk to Pam. Doreen gave him a hug, and says that was the last time she saw him. That wasn’t the end of the Wagners’ connection to Colton, though. He’d spend quite a bit more time at their house—not that they’d know about it until they got a call from the police.

  Chapter 15

  Colton’s summer days with the Wagners were moments of idealized normalcy for him. Back on Haven Place, though, things were growing uglier between him and his mother. In later interviews with counselors, Colton said it was at this age that it became clear to him the extent and damage of his mother’s alcoholism. He said that at one point he tried to give her a Bible, and another time an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet, but “she burned it.” Her drinking, Colton said, led to violence. One day when both Pam and her boyfriend beat him, Colton decided to take off.

  AFTER JIMMY MOVED OUT of Pam’s trailer, he never expected to see or hear from Colton again. Then one day in 2001, when he was living across the bridge in Stanwood, he got a call.

  “It was Colt and he was real upset. He said his mom had been beating on him. I told him, ‘If you need to get out of there, get the hell out and walk to the main road.’ I called Island Transit [the free bus that loops the island every hour] and told them what was going on. They had a driver go out for him, actually picked the kid up and delivered him right to my door. When he showed up he had bruises all over his arms and legs and a couple on his back.”

  Jimmy says Colton stayed with him for ten days. Colton spent his time sketching airplanes and rocket ships in a lined notebook. He also practiced with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

  “So one day,” says Jimmy, “nice day, warmish, good outdoor working weather, I’m watching this kid fly around on the computer… man, he just loved airplanes. He was a good kid, you know? He just had issues. So I say, ‘Hey, you want to do something different? You want to go there?’ and I pointed up. Well, when he finally got my drift he started grinning like a monkey eating shit.”

  Jimmy drove them to a private strip owned by a friend whom he “talked out of a plane.” He walked a wide-eyed Colton up to an old Cessna 170, a 145-horsepower tail-dragger that’d been built in the 1950s. Jimmy showed him how to do the walkaround safety check, then buckled Colton into the right seat. “I got in, yelled, ‘Clear!’ and fired that bitch up. Well, Colt didn’t know what to do! He’s just going, ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘You ready?’ He gave me this funny look, like for a second he didn’t quite know… and I just said, ‘Here we go!’”

  Aft
er taxiing to the end of the smoothed-dirt strip, Jimmy spun the plane around and opened up the throttle. “I wound her out and yelled, ‘Hang on, buddy!’ When I got it up to speed and started to pull back, I tell you his guts all but fell out of him!”

  Jimmy leaned the little plane into a gentle bank and flew south down the spine of Camano then out over the water, turning east over the top of Hat Island and crossing Possession Sound to the mainland. He says Colt’s nervousness drained away as they gained altitude. Jimmy pointed the nose of the Cessna north toward Canada, and set her on a straight and level course at three thousand feet over the town of Marysville. Then he turned to Colton: “Put your hands on the wheel.”

  Colton stared at the yoke in front of him. “He wasn’t expecting that!” says Jimmy. “I said, ‘C’mon, this ain’t no different than what you been doing on the computer.’ So he put his little hands up there and death-gripped that son of a bitch.”

  Jimmy let go of the wheel on his side of the cockpit and suddenly ten-year-old Colton Harris-Moore was flying an airplane.

  “Once he settled down a little, I told him to push the wheel in just a bit… The nose dipped and he goes, ‘Whoa!’ Then I had him pull back… ‘Whoa!’” Jimmy showed Colton how the trim and the flaps worked and had him reach down and put his feet on the pedals to waggle the tail back and forth. “By this time we’re almost the fuck up to Mount Vernon, so I had him put us into a turn and we came back south.” Jimmy took back the controls for the approach and landing on the narrow strip.

  “He was just amazed,” says Jimmy. Over the following week, he took Colton up twice more, letting him fly the plane longer each time and further familiarizing him with the controls and instruments. Colt was in heaven.

  Back on the ground, though…

  “His mother finally caught up with him. She found out where he was and she’d leave messages, threatening to get me for kidnapping,” says Jimmy. “We’d come in and listen to the machine and the kid says, ‘Don’t send me home.’ He was fucking petrified. That’s when we did the recording.”

  Jimmy got out a microcassette and Colton put his story on tape, which, Jimmy says, he gave to the authorities. “We ended up calling the Island County cops and we got a hold of CPS.” First to show up was a county deputy. “The kid was terrified when the cop got there, shaking like a leaf, crying and everything—he was scared of the cop,” says Jimmy. “I was trying to tell him it was going to be okay. CPS ended up carting him off, but then Pam got him back three or four days later.”

  Jimmy tells this story teary-eyed. Court documents corroborate the events, referring to a CPS investigation for “negligent treatment or maltreatment” and reports “Colt being afraid to go home after being thrashed by his mother and her boyfriend.” It also quotes the police officer saying, “Colton does not want to go home to his mother Pamela… and if mother comes to get child tonight I will place him in protective custody.”

  The CPS risk tag rating for this episode was listed as “high,” meaning CPS needed to have a social worker see Colton within twenty-four hours. In Washington State, CPS does not have the authority to actually take a child away from a parent, even temporarily. Only the police—through protective custody—or a judge via a court order can remove a child. In this instance, Colton was placed in protective custody and taken to a foster home. Once a child is under protective custody, DSHS, of which CPS is part, has only seventy-two hours to file a dependency petition or it must return the child to the parent.

  In Colton’s case, he was returned to Pam, who said that later, when Colt would get mad at her, she’d tease him about his time in the foster home, asking if “he wanted to go back to his other mother.”

  FOR HER PART, PAM denies that she was an abusive mother and blames her anger back then on her inability to control Colton. “I talked to his pediatrician about referring us to a hospital to get a brain scan because I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t just take him up there because his insurance couldn’t of covered it. I wanted to take him because he’d thrown something at me or hit me, my eye and forehead were bruised. She wouldn’t do it, and said, ‘I don’t think we have to go that far.’ I said, ‘I think we do!’”

  Instead, Pam took Colton for an evaluation at Compass Health. Originally a Lutheran orphanage, Compass evolved over the past 110 years into a community-based nonprofit that provides mental health and chemical dependency services to thirteen thousand low-income children and adults—as well as the homeless and incarcerated—in Island, San Juan, Skagit, and Snohomish Counties.

  In August 2001, a Compass Health clinician noted instability and sleep disturbances in ten-year-old Colton. They diagnosed him with ADHD, parent-child relational problem, and possible depression.

  On September 10, 2001, a Compass clinician described Colton: “Assertive, talkative 10-year-old who can become quite angry—but the situation with mother and her boyfriend drinking, living in a tiny trailer, mother drinking all the time, and the physical abuse Colton has gotten from boyfriend makes his anger easy to understand.”

  The response was to put Colton on Prozac.

  DURING THOSE FIRST INTERVIEWS at Compass Health, Colton told the therapists that he’d gotten into only a few problems so far at school and that he was determined “not to get into trouble this year.”

  That same month, though, Colton began to find serious trouble outside of school.

  “We’d made a path through an undeveloped property on Bretland Road, just east of Haven,” says Joel, Colton’s friend and fellow ninja. “We even built a ladder to get us down the cliff to the water.” Joel says that they were walking along the beach one day when suddenly Colton ran off. “When he comes back, he’s got a fishing pole and he tells me he stole it.” The boys headed home, and by the time they made it the short distance to Haven Place, Island County deputies were already pulling up to Pam’s. “They knew right where to go,” says Joel. “Colt gave the fishing rod back to the guy he took it from so he didn’t press charges.”

  Despite the lack of charges, the Island County police made an official report of the incident, naming Colton Harris-Moore as a suspected thief. He was ten and a half years old.

  A PSYCHOLOGIST REPORTED THAT Prozac seemed to only increase Colton’s “agitation,” so doctors prescribed Geodon, a big-league antipsychotic strong enough to chillax a rampaging water buffalo. The drug had just been approved that year by the FDA for schizophrenia, though it was also utilized “off label” for treating mania resulting from bipolar disorder and some cases of severe ADHD. A psychological evaluation of Colton later states: “Records are not clear as to why such a potent medicine was tried, but most likely it was to assist in behavioral control.”

  Compass Health also sent someone out to the trailer for in-home family counseling. Pam says Colton participated, but that she found “little benefit” from the therapists, who were “well-meaning but ineffective.”

  WHEN THE CAMANO KIDS moved on to sixth grade, it was back on the bus and across the bridge to Stanwood Middle School, home of the Spartans. That’s where, from all accounts including his own, Colton completely lost whatever constructive relationship he’d ever had with school.

  “Stanwood had the normal school cliques,” says Kory. “Jocks, goths, girlie girlies… and Colton couldn’t get along with anyone. When people weren’t picking on him then he’d start it. He’d argue with everyone.”

  Christa Postma met Colton that year. “Colt was always getting into trouble. He was like the kid who’s always loud in class, not being quiet when he was supposed to, disrupting everything. We’d be learning something and he’d just say his opinion on it. Like he’d say whatever the teacher was saying was ‘bogus.’”

  The teachers attempted to discipline Colton, but had little success. “Usually you were sent outside the class, and then after a while the teacher would go out and talk to you. If they thought you were going to behave better, then they’d bring you back in. Colt would always get brought back in… and then ge
t kicked out again.”

  Christa, who’d been diagnosed with ADHD and ADD, says she recognized a lot of the symptoms in Colton. “I know I can be really hyper and annoying without realizing it. All through middle school I was on medication for it, but Colt said he wasn’t on anything for his ADHD. He’d be hyper and annoying, and then when people called him out for it he’d get pretty upset and then he’d be a jerk to them.”

  After school, Colton and Christa hung out behind the Stanwood Library. Outside of class, Christa says Colton seemed “really smart” but unable or just unwilling to use those smarts in school. “I’d be like, ‘I have to get home and do homework or my mom will kill me,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t need to.’ He kinda resented authority and liked being able to do whatever he wanted. He’d always say how much he hated school.”

  Reports from clinicians at Compass Health who interviewed Colton around this time state that he told them that his mom was becoming “increasingly angry, does not encourage school.” Colton himself estimated that from the time he started middle school he missed about half of his classes and his mom’s response was “It’s your fault, not mine.”

  According to Pam, Colton would stay up all night playing video games and then be too tired to go to school the next day. His favorite game at the time was Grand Theft Auto. “Then I got interested in that one!” says Pam. “I said, ‘Give me that thing, I want to see what I can do with it.’ And then Colt went to bed and I was staying up playing it! He got up a couple hours later and said, ‘Are you still playing that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I like killing those hookers on the sidewalk!’”