The Barefoot Bandit

by Bob Friel

  Shauna’s overall impression of Colton was that he was “a nice kid” and nothing like the sociopaths she’d dealt with before. “The vandalism stuff like the fire and the shot fired in the house, that only happened when Harley was there, not when Colton was on his own,” she says.

  In preparing his defense, Rachel Miyoshi reviewed not only Colton’s criminal record, but also his school, health, and CPS files. In April, the court approved her request to hire Delton Young, PhD, at county expense. Bellevue-based Dr. Young is a psychologist with thirty years’ experience, including nine years at Harvard Medical School. He’s also the author of the book Wayward Kids: Understanding and Treating Antisocial Youth, in which he makes the argument that the only way to successfully combat juvenile crime is to understand the psychological, social, and biological factors that cause it.

  Dr. Young reviewed all the records and then met with Colton for interviews and testing, which included an IQ exam, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. His report states: “Given that Colton has only superficially participated in school for several years, these scores are reasonably strong and suggest that his intellectual capacities are easily in the average range.” He also found the now-sixteen-year-old Colton to be relatively mature.

  The full evaluation, filed June 15, referred to the dozen Child Protective Services reports and covered Colton’s past mental health diagnoses and treatments, including “a wide range of psychiatric medications including antidepressants, stimulant medications, mood stabilizers, and even an anti-psychotic medication.”

  Dr. Young recounted the teen’s pattern of destructive behavior, and admitted, “On paper, Colton resembles the picture of an emerging antisocial character—violating the rights of others and neglecting his own individual development (e.g., education).” However, he found several factors that he believed showed that Colton was “not a typical antisocial youth.”

  Colton’s violent episodes, Young noted, appeared to be limited to fights with his mother. He didn’t use drugs or alcohol, a fact that separated him from the vast majority of antisocial youth. “By Colton’s account (and that of numerous available records) Colton’s mother has been heavily affected by alcohol abuse throughout Colton’s developmental years; and there has been a variety of men in the home who had their own alcohol and drug addictions. Colton understands that both his parents have had severe substance abuse problems, and he wishes to avoid complicating his life further with drugs or alcohol.” Young also found that “Colton does not externalize blame and responsibility for his actions. He readily acknowledges his poor choices… He holds out some hope of taking up a much healthier developmental track in the future.”

  During their meeting, Colton told Young about his issues with insomnia, low energy, poor appetite, depression, and anger, but said that even though he knew he was eventually going to be caught and “locked up,” he felt better in every aspect when he was out on the run as opposed to when he was at home. “He reports that for many years he has felt depressed when he is around home and his mother.”

  Dr. Young concluded that Colton’s primary issue was “long-term, agitated and self-defeating depression” caused by his upbringing, which “precluded the development of basic trust and psychological health of the child.” Young traced Colton’s social anxiety, deep resentment, impulsiveness, and lack of focus and interest in schoolwork to that depression. He provided several DSM diagnoses; the most serious was the continuing depression stemming from “many years of stressful, unstable and even abusive home environment.” He also reported that Colton still suffered with parent-child relational problem, “a serious psychiatric problem located not within the child, but between the child and his parent.” Young reiterated that “a good part of his self-defeating and defiant behaviors can be traced to an accumulation of resentment, hostility and despair in that maternal relationship.”

  Colton told the psychologist that he understood he needed help from mental health professionals and said that his number-one worry was “his future.”

  Young wrote that “Colton is the kind of teen whose psychological development could be hardened into an uncaring and unhopeful young man if compelled to spend lengthy periods in JRA [Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration] institutions. What he needs most at this point is to associate with healthier peers, teachers and other adults; and to get to work and school.”

  Colton was clearly not happy being locked up, but told Young that some times were worse than others. “He was able to relate that his mood drops precipitously after he has a telephone call from his mother. He fears that his mother wants him to get a long sentence.”

  Looking ahead to Colton’s eventual release, Dr. Young’s report said that “Colton surely cannot be expected to stay on a positive course living in his mother’s home,” and mentioned that his aunt Sandy offered to provide him with a home and structure. Sandy wrote a letter to the judge describing her ranch and the animals that Colton had shown interest in and said, “We would play a positive role in his life.”

  JUVENILE COURTS DON’T WORK the same as the adult court system. There’s no trial by jury, just adjudication by a judge. The test for guilt is a preponderance of evidence, not “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Despite that, Colton’s defense team felt the county had little to go on for many of the charges.

  “We whittled it down from the twenty-three to three that they could probably prove,” says Shauna Snyder. “There was only one they had absolute proof on and that was the house they caught him in. The other two counts, they had some proof, so we took the deal instead of having to go to trial on all twenty-three. Plus they were threatening to pile on even more charges if we didn’t take the deal. It would have been a mess to go to trial.”

  For the county, a deal that resulted in serious incarceration time made sense. “He’d become known in our office as a frequent flier,” says Island County prosecutor Greg Banks. Banks had been serving as prosecutor since 1999, but says Colton stood out among juvenile offenders. “For a young kid, he had been through the system a lot.” Each of those previous times, Banks says the system had been more than fair. “With juveniles, rarely do we just bring the hammer down. The idea is to try to rehabilitate them, and the system is designed with more flexibility than the adult justice system.” Banks notes that a number of times Colton had been given community service instead of detention, and credit had been given for attending therapy.

  “There were services provided to Colton along the way,” he says. “Most of the time we have pretty good results, but Colton was a glaring exception. He’d been escalating, really shaking up the community. Now we had evidence that he and Harley were in possession of a gun, so it seemed like the best way to protect the people of Island County was to incarcerate him.”

  The deal they struck had Colton plead guilty to three charges, each with a sentence of fifty-two weeks, to be served consecutively. On any one of these felony counts, the maximum sentence for a juvenile could have been detention until his twenty-first birthday, which in Colt’s case would have meant about five years from the time of his arrest.

  Prepared to take the three-year sentence, there was still one more big hurdle for Colton: appearing in a public courtroom. Rachel Miyoshi says Colton begged her to try to get cameras banned. When she couldn’t, his next priority was getting a haircut. Says Shauna Snyder, “We had to file a whole motion to get a barber in the jail because Colton didn’t want to go to court if his hair wasn’t cut.”

  Chapter 20

  Judges have discretion as to where juveniles serve their time. In Colton’s case, the judge looked at his history of successfully eluding the police and punched his ticket for Green Hill School, the highest-security facility in Washington State’s JRA. Seventy-five miles south of Seattle in the town of Chehalis, Green Hill accepts only male prisoners, and along with those convicted in JRA it also houses juveniles sentenced as adults under the state’s Department of Corrections. Any kid convicted of murder in Washington State goes
to Green Hill until he’s eighteen and transfers out to adult prison.

  Despite its maximum/medium-security designation, Green Hill is no Alcatraz. A fence surrounds the school and shop buildings, a gymnasium, and the housing units. Inside, though, it feels more like a school with extra security—that is, until the occasional hell breaks loose. The kids can’t go home at night, but otherwise, Green Hill’s general rules—no talking when moving between buildings, but liberal policies on cursing—seem looser than a Catholic grade school.

  Colton arrived and, like all prisoners, was assigned to a high-security intake unit for his first thirty days so the staff could get a behavioral assessment. In this unit, called Birch (all housing units are named after trees), kids go to classes, eat, and recreate separately from the general population. Staff look over their records and closely watch how they behave, then send them either to a sex offender unit, drug and alcohol education unit, or general population housing.

  During intake, the boys are given their uniforms: white sneakers, navy blue pants, and green T-shirts, sweatshirts, and jackets. They’re told the house rules and about honor levels, which offer increased privileges in exchange for good behavior. Honor Level IV can nab a detainee a private room with his own TV and PlayStation. The kids are also instructed from day one that they can get out of Green Hill asap via what’s called a CRA, community risk assessment. The CRA is a mandatory report card completed for each juvenile inmate every ninety days. Based on a point system, two consecutive low-score CRAs count as a “get out of jail free” card. Depending on the exact scores, kids can either be sent home if they’ve served their minimum sentence or to a low-security community facility, aka group home, aka halfway house.

  After his thirty days in Birch, Colton was transferred to Maple Living Unit in the general population. Maple had ten rooms per wing, including two special Level IV honor rooms. Staff say that typically they try to limit the number of kids per wing to twelve or thirteen, with a few doubled up and the rest single-bunked. Other than assigned roommates, “the kids are never allowed in each other’s rooms.” There’s a video game console in each wing’s common area, and that’s also where the guys hang out to play cards and watch TV.

  The daily grind at Green Hill means school from 8 a.m. until lunch, then back to the housing unit for a while, then back to school until 4 p.m. Kids work on their high school diplomas, GEDs, or pre-college courses, and get vocational training in computers, metal shop, vehicle maintenance, and landscaping. Along with classes, the kids go to various meetings, like AA and NA (Narcotics Anonymous), depending on their issues. Green Hill staff say that about 95 percent of the kids come in with substance-abuse problems. All the boys also take part in therapy.

  Washington’s JRA uses the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) treatment model. “Most of the kids we get don’t know how to appropriately interact with people or deal with stress or their own emotions,” says one longtime staffer. “DBT offers one-on-one counseling, skills acquisitions groups, and milieu therapy, which is a monitoring of their activities in the environment to see what other interventions and coaching are needed.”

  After school, the kids get one hour of recreation and then they’re sent back to their housing unit, where they can watch TV and play video games until bedtime. Each boy is allowed a ten-minute phone call every night, and can request a second. Parents can call in, and the kids can call out collect. On weekends, they’re allowed outside to play baseball, football, and gang war.

  MS-13, Surenos, Nortenos, Bloods, Crips… according to staff and former inmates, Green Hill has “tons of gang activity.” The gangs take part in frequent race-based beat downs, including choreographed events where they’ll start numerous fights at the same time in order to overwhelm the guards’ abilities to respond. Serious infractions of the rules are punished by a timeout in Intense Management Unit (IMU), where bad boys are put on lockdown twenty-three hours a day. Not every kid coming into Green Hill has to pledge to a gang, though. “There are groups of kids that aren’t involved,” says a staff member. “It’s like high school, there are different cliques… like over here you have the cheerleaders, and over here you have the Crips.”

  “I stayed out of the gangs, and so did Colt,” says Josh from Point Roberts. “But there were still a lot of fights and lots of people just running up on guys and beating them up.” Josh was sentenced to three years in Green Hill for malicious mischief—“I stole a boat and wrecked it on a beach”—and for intimidating a witness. When Colt arrived at Maple Unit, he and Josh found out they lived not too far away from each other on Puget Sound. “We got pretty tight,” says Josh. Colt told him that his dad had been in the army. “And he said his mom used to be a sheriff, but he didn’t get along with her.”

  Josh says Colton stood out among the kids at Green Hill. “Colt was a nice guy and smart, really smart.” Proof, he says, was that Colton read books and studied subjects other than what they were forced to for class. “He knows things, uses a lot of big words.” Staff at Green Hill say the average reading level inside is about fifth grade, so any book learnin’ can come off as smart. According to Josh, Colton had three specific interests he liked to study: “Criminology, psychology, and flying.”

  One of Colt’s favorite books while in Green Hill was a psychology text on how to diagnose various disorders. At one point, says Pam, Colt called and diagnosed her with ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder.

  According to Josh, a lot of Colton’s airplane research came from the guards. “He talked about wanting to fly a lot. And you could ask the guards to look up stuff for you online. It was up to them whether they’d give it to you or not, but he asked for a bunch of information on flying, and they downloaded it for him.”

  The kids don’t have Internet access themselves, but staff members say they’d do research for them as a reward, “a motivational tool to stay in treatment.” One of Green Hill’s computers also had a flight simulator on it, and Colton jumped on that as often as possible.

  Another thing about Colt that stood out was his manner. “He didn’t swear at all, which was really rare,” and it wasn’t long before he started having trouble with the other boys. “Guys picked on him a lot in there,” says Josh. “They’d punk him, take his stuff, and push him around, smack him. He wouldn’t fight back, which made it worse.”

  In a shark tank milieu like juvie, acting less than tough can get you turned into chum. But it wasn’t just Colton’s atypical big-word vocabulary and his annoying habit of diagnosing other kids’ mental problems that got him punked.

  “He made a bad name for himself with his mouth,” says Josh. “He’d say some really creepy things, like that when he got out his plan was ‘I’m going to take over the world.’ Everyone would laugh at him, but he was totally serious about it. It was kind of mad scientist stuff. He didn’t quite have the plan together, not many details—he was still plotting—but he was going big, getting a lot of money, and he didn’t want to earn it, just wanted to steal it all.”

  Colt, says Josh, made no secret of his plans—or anything else that popped into his mind—and that’s what caused problems. “He just told people all of his thoughts and they’d turn around and tell him he was stupid and should shut up.” Colton would back off for a bit, “but then he’d run his mouth back at them. He’d keep at it when they told him to stop, so then when he’d go back to his room, someone would run in right behind him and pound him. This went on the entire time he was in there. He’s smart, but he has his mind in the wrong place.”

  Colt’s battles with the other kids stayed below the radar of the guards and counselors, which was important, because getting caught fighting meant a bad mark on his all-important CRA. The one part of his master plan for taking over the world that Colt did already have plotted was getting out of high-security Green Hill and into a fenceless group home as soon as possible. And for that, he needed those consecutive good report cards.

  “He always went to school and always did what you tol
d him,” says a Green Hill staff member. “In a lot of respects he was a pleasure to deal with. You’d say bedtime is nine p.m. and he’d always be in his room at nine. He was always friendly with the staff… but you just had this feeling about him.” The staffer says they could sense the wheels turning in Colton’s head. “He was pretty quick, bright, but also criminally sophisticated in that he was a planner, a thinker… he was heads and shoulders above the other kids in those respects.”

  The majority of boys at Green Hill had crappy upbringings, coming from broken homes often darkened by neglect, abuse, and substance problems. Many were fighting mental health issues along with their own booze or drug monkeys, and plenty had run wild on the streets from a young age. The programs and therapies in JRA are designed to break through to those kids able and/or willing to be salvaged.

  Colton’s particular makeup, though, made him difficult to treat. “He was psychologically and intellectually very mature, but emotionally immature,” says one staff member who worked with him. “He never took any of our ‘shaping the future’ stuff seriously. In therapy, he would always have smart answers, never true answers.”

  They say that Colton wouldn’t open up to the counselors, which was an integral part of getting him help. “He’d never truly say this is the kind of home life I had, or this is what I was lacking growing up and so I want to change this, deal with this to move on… I think that by the time Colton got to us he was past the point of being able to open those floodgates and tell you what he wanted.”

  Instead, staffers say Colton put his efforts toward manipulation. “It was as if he had this intense grudge against the system and felt that however he could beat it he’d beat it instead of working within it to better himself.”

  Beating the juvenile prison system meant one thing for Colton: getting two good CRAs. And the way that’s set up, it was a piece of cake for him. The CRA is a simple form asking nine “yes” or “no” questions along with two that have a third option: “moderate.” Depending on the question, each answer coincides with a point score—0 for a no and up to 12 points for a yes. Inmates shoot for scores under 20 to go home, under 25 to go to a community facility/group home.