The 20-year-old “Barefoot Bandit” was sentenced on Friday to more than seven years in prison after pleading guilty to dozens of charges.
Colton Harris-Moore gained international notoriety while evading police across the US in stolen planes, boats and cars during a two-year crime spree.
“This case is a tragedy in many ways, but it’s a triumph of the human spirit in other ways,” Judge Vickie Churchill said.
Photo: Reuters
She described Harris-Moore’s upbringing as a “mind-numbing absence of hope,” and said she believed he was genuinely remorseful and contrite.
Friday’s proceedings consolidated cases against Harris-Moore in three Washington State counties. He has already pleaded guilty to federal charges in Seattle and will be sentenced for those crimes early next year. He will serve his state and federal sentences at the same time.
In a statement provided to Churchill, he said his childhood was one he would not wish on his “darkest enemies.”
Still, he said he takes responsibility for the crime spree that brought him international notoriety.
Harris-Moore said he studied manuals and online videos to teach himself to be a pilot, and the thrills he experienced while flying stolen planes renewed his passion for life and will help him rehabilitate while in prison.
“The euphoria of the countdown to takeoff and the realization of a dream was nearly blinding,” he said of his first illicit flight on Nov. 11, 2008. “My first thought after takeoff was: ‘Oh my God, I’m flying.’ I had waited my entire life for that moment.”
He said he would use his prison time to study and get ready to apply to college, with the hope of earning an aeronautical engineering degree.
He pleaded guilty to counts including identity theft, theft of a firearm and residential burglary.
Harris-Moore’s daring run from the law earned him international fame and a movie deal to help repay his victims after he flew a stolen plane from Indiana to the Bahamas in July last year, crash-landed it near a mangrove swamp and was arrested by Bahamian authorities in a hail of bullets.
State prosecutors asked for a nine-and-a-half year sentence. Browne and attorney Emma Scanlan sought a low-end, six-year term, citing Harris-Moore’s bleak childhood in a Camano Island trailer with an alcoholic mother and a series of her convict boyfriends. They laid out the details of his upbringing in psychiatric and mitigation reports filed with the court.
Harris-Moore’s first conviction came at age 12, in 2004, for possession of stolen property, and according to the reports, his first experience with burglary came when he broke into the homes of his classmates to steal food because his mother spent most of her Social Security income on beer and cigarettes — something she has denied.
Over the next three years, he was convicted of theft, burglary, malicious mischief and assault, among other crimes. At one point, he was arrested when a detective posed as a pizza-delivery driver.
In 2007, the boy was sentenced to three years in a juvenile lockup after pleading guilty to three burglary counts in Island County. However, he fled the minimum-security facility in April 2008 and was soon back to his old tricks, breaking into unoccupied vacation homes, stealing food and sometimes staying there.
As red-faced investigators repeatedly failed to catch him, his antics escalated: He began stealing planes from small, rural airports and crash-landing them — at least five in all.
“What was characterized by the media as the swashbuckling adventures of a rakish teenager were in fact the actions of a depressed, possibly suicidal young man with waxing and waning post-traumatic stress disorder [following his first plane crash in November 2008],” wrote Richard Adler, a psychiatrist who evaluated him for the defense lawyers.
Waves of burglaries broke out on Orcas Island, where Kyle Ater runs his Homegrown Market and Deli, in late 2009 and early last year, after stolen planes were found at the airport there. The second time, Harris-Moore left Ater’s new security system in a utility sink, under a running faucet. He took cash and a tray of croissants, and Ater’s insurance company jacked up his rates.
Mike Parnell, a former owner of the Oakley sunglasses company who lives on Orcas, was repeatedly victimized. Harris-Moore hid out for long periods in the second level of his hangar at the airport, and when Parnell and his family would go on trips in their plane, Harris-Moore would take their car to their house and eat their food. At one point, Harris-Moore entered their home while Parnell was there with his wife and three children and grabbed his wife’s car keys off a counter.
“We were all fearing for our lives,” Parnell said on Thursday. “The kids wouldn’t sleep in their own bedrooms. We purchased night vision goggles. I’m glad that day is finally approaching when we will finally know what the consequences are, and I hope it’s sufficient for the way our whole island suffered.”
Harris-Moore’s final spree came after he stole a pistol in eastern British Columbia and took a plane from a hangar in Idaho, where investigators found bare footprints on the floor and wall.
That plane crashed near Granite Falls, Washington, after it ran out of fuel.
He made his way to Oregon in a 9.75m boat stolen in southwestern Washington — stopping first to leave US$100 at an animal shelter in Raymond, Washington. From Oregon, authorities said, Harris-Moore traveled across the US, frequently stealing cars from the parking lots of small airports.
In Indiana, he stole another plane and made for the Bahamas, more than 1,600km away, where authorities finally caught him in a manhunt that spanned multiple islands.
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
‘THE RED LINE’: Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised a thorough probe into the attack on the senator, who had announced his presidential bid in March Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a possible candidate in the country’s presidential election next year, was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Bogota on Saturday, authorities said. His conservative Democratic Center party released a statement calling it “an unacceptable act of violence.” The attack took place in a park in the Fontibon neighborhood when armed assailants shot him from behind, said the right-wing Democratic Center, which was the party of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The men are not related. Images circulating on social media showed Uribe Turbay, 39, covered in blood being held by several people. The Santa Fe Foundation
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS