News Update

POSTED: Monday, Nov. 09, 2009

Camano Island: Thefts might signal return of teen bandit

crime: Fugitive who takes planes to steal from island homes is back on the prowl, say police

CAMANO ISLAND – Colton Harris-Moore has been a one-boy crime wave since he was 7 years old.

He has broken into houses, stolen cars and burglarized markets, hardware stores and cafés for years on this rural, woodsy island near Stanwood, north of Seattle.

Since early in 2008, when the now 18-year-old escaped from a juvenile holding facility, Harris-Moore has been leading police on a fruitless chase through Washington, Canada and Idaho – stealing two boats and crash-landing three planes (he taught himself to fly on his computer, authorities suspect) along the way.

Now it looks like he might be back.

Police are investigating a wave of burglaries over the past few weeks on Camano Island and Whidbey Island. There are no official suspects, but many here are convinced that the youth whose Facebook fan club numbers more than 7,000 and has turned him into an international folk hero, often described as a teenage Jesse James, is responsible.

On Camano Island, where residents said sheriff’s deputies have been combing the woods on foot and sending search helicopters up at night, Harris-Moore more often is considered, simply, a thug.

“If someone says he’s not intelligent, I would say that person is a fool,” Josh Flickner said. It was Flickner’s market that Harris-Moore, with police in hot pursuit, famously plowed into with a stolen Mercedes-Benz before fleeing on foot while the car was still moving.

“But the people who have called him Robin Hood or James Bond on his fan club page on social networking Web site Facebook, it makes me want to vomit,” Flickner said. “It just makes me sad that there’s so many people in our society who would give glory to someone whose only intention is to thrive on the hurt of others.”

Harris-Moore’s baby face – which belies his 6-foot-3, 205-pound frame – is familiar to many people in Washington state. Mugshots, surveillance camera photos and Harris-Moore’s self-portrait for months have been plastered in newspapers and on market bulletin boards and television news programs.

The fugitive’s mother raised him in a single-wide trailer in the woods on the south end of the island. Posted along the driveway these days are multiple “No Trespassing” signs.

By the time Harris-Moore turned 12, he had a conviction for possession of stolen property. Over the next few years he racked up convictions for theft, burglary, malicious mischief and fourth- degree assault.

Neighbors said most often he stole not valuables but necessities: tools, blankets, food.

“He’s broken in here a couple of times. He steals vitaminwater, beef jerky, hot dogs. He doesn’t like junk food,” said Patty Arnett, a clerk at the Tyee Grocery on south Camano. At one point he broke into a fire station and stole a thermal imaging camera, officials said, giving him night-vision capability in the woods.

Neighbors said Harris-Moore might have begun stealing as a child because his mother was unemployed and sometimes threw him out of the house.

NEW LEVEL OF CRIME

Harris-Moore became adept at setting up camps in the dense woods that cover the majority of Camano Island.

Island County sheriff’s deputies – having found a load of pizza boxes at one of his camps – once caught him by posing as pizza deliverers. Another time, officers arrested him when they found a light on in an abandoned house.

But in April 2008, Harris-Moore escaped from a minimum-security juvenile home in Renton, to the exasperation of those who put him there. Since then, he has been suspected in a rash of thefts and burglaries across northern Washington and Canada.

His crimes might have reached a new level that November, when authorities say a Cessna 182 belonging to a Seattle radio talk show personality was stolen from a hangar on Orcas Island and flown to a “hard landing” on the Yakama Indian Reservation.

Then last Sept. 11, a Cirrus SR22 was stolen and flown to another of the San Juan Islands. The thefts accompanied a rash of burglaries across Orcas Island.

San Juan County Sheriff Bill Cumming said Harris-Moore, who long has had an interest in aviation, is a suspect in both thefts; though he is not known to have had any formal flight training, he did once buy a flight manual using a stolen credit card.

Officials believe he left the San Juan Islands in September on a stolen boat, which was found at the Canadian border at Point Roberts.

From there, authorities theorize, Harris-Moore made his way across Canada to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, where another Cessna 182 was stolen Oct. 2 and landed in a logged-out forest area at Granite Falls, east of Everett.

RISE TO FAME

Neighbors on Camano Island are convinced Harris-Moore flew over the island before landing at Granite Falls.

Three days after the plane theft, a house not far from where the plane crashed was burglarized, a case that seemed to fit Harris-Moore’s m.o.: Blankets, shoes and food were missing. Police combed the woods, and someone – police said they believe it was “the suspect” – fired a shot at deputies.

A full-scale manhunt – three dozen officers, plus SWAT teams and search dogs – ensued. The FBI has been called in.

But the teenage fugitive remains at large, and his fame, perhaps predictably, has spread.

There are now at least three Colton Harris-Moore T-shirts to be had (“Mama Tried,” reads one), a “Ballad of Barefoot Harris” on YouTube (“He was born in the woods with a lockpick in his hand”) and the Facebook fan page set up by three young men in Washington and Oregon has members from all over the world.

Zack Sestak, a 26-year-old writer from the Seattle area who started the fan page, said he was intrigued by Harris-Moore’s story after researching it for an article.