The “Barefoot Bandit” is not all Colton Harris-Moore has been called in his short splash of life.
Neighbors say his mother screamed things at him so vicious that they cringed when her words echoed through the giant evergreens that cover much of this island in Puget Sound. Classmates say he could be a bully — when he attended school.
Yet perhaps his most benign nickname is the most telling. Long before stealing boats and planes made him a marvel of elusiveness, an Internet antihero, Harris-Moore, 19, was suspected of stealing cookies and frozen pizza from the Kostelyk family, a few gravel roads from the squalor that was his home, a trailer on a dead end here, barely an hour from Seattle.
The Kostelyks had waterfront property and a freezer full of food. He lived inland and had nothing.
“We called him ‘Island Boy,’” said Linda Johnson, whose mother, Maxine Kostelyk, was among Harris-Moore’s first suspected victims. “He came back over and over again — frozen pizza, cookies, ice cream. He was a tall boy, and he was growing.”
By the time he was captured on a stolen motorboat in the Bahamas last week, racing from the police with video-game gall, the 1.95m-tall Harris-Moore had become a sensation.
After escaping from a juvenile halfway house here more than two years ago, he eluded authorities across North America using his wits and his fleet feet. The police said he made makeshift homes in empty houses for days or weeks at a time and somehow taught himself to fly, mastering the art of crash-landing and walking away.
Even in the age of the search engine, Harris-Moore seemed untraceable and unknowable, part high-tech Huck Finn, part cunning criminal.
An examination of his early life and troubles suggests a picture far less cinematic. According to court and public documents and dozens of interviews, Harris-Moore was nobody’s hero, not even his own.
On the contrary, whether he was hiding in the Kostelyks’ treehouse, watching for delivery of the high-powered flashlight the police believe he ordered with a stolen credit card or flying solo to the Bahamas in a stolen Cessna this month, isolated in the tiny cockpit for more than 1,600km — Harris-Moore, for much of his life, was alone and hungry.
That was true even as he was being celebrated by thousands of fans on Facebook.
“He says he’s not into any of that,” said Monique Gomez, a lawyer who briefly represented Harris-Moore in the Bahamas. “He just wants to get this behind him.”
“I think if he had proper direction, he wouldn’t have done what he did,” Gomez said.
Harris-Moore had a volatile childhood and was often in conflict with his mother, Pam Kohler. His father appears to have been absent. Public documents show child protection officials had been referred to the family at least a dozen times by the time Harris-Moore was 15.
A social worker’s report from the time he was first arrested, at 12, drew a succinct conclusion, at least from the boy’s point of view.
“Colton wants Mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job and have food in the house,” the report said. “Mom refuses.”
When Harris-Moore was four, someone reported Kohler after seeing “a woman grab a small child by the hair and beat his head severely,” according to a psychiatric summary 12 years later.
By the time he was 10, an investigation involving “negligent treatment or maltreatment” had been initiated.
RSS