Meet Colton Harris-Moore, "The Barefoot Bandit".
This six-foot five-inch eighteen year-old may be the best cat burglar in recent history, and has made national crime shows and is now profiled in "The Times" of London.
Young Colton first came to the attention of authorities well south of us on Camano Island, where he repeatedly broke into vacation homes to gather food and camping supplies. Since then, he's been on a two-year crime spree, outrunning frustrated Cops from Seattle to Canada.
Known as "The Barefoot Bandit" as he rarely wears shoes, we discovered him on our little island when a small plane belonging to a Seattle radio show host dissapeared from the island airport. It turned up later crash-landed on the Yakima Indian Reservation, hundreds of miles to the east.
It seems young Colton taught himself to fly by playing video games.
Sometime later, he returned to our community and hit three business's and one bank in one night. First he broke into a local pub and raided the cashbox. Then he climbed a utility pole barefoot, broke into the second-story of a hardware store and robbed it. The local Bank and the grocery market were hit and their ATM machines battered. While in the market, he cut himself while breaking into the ATM. He calmly went to the isle where they stock the bleach, cleaned up his blood and patched himself with first-aid gauze.
It's unclear exactly when, but one of our Sheriff Deputy's persued him in a foot chase. The Deputy complained that as the 6'5" Colton easily pulled away and fled into the forest he was laughing his ass off.
Then, he proceded to steal a boat from one of our friends on the North Shore, and headed for Canada, near where the boat was recovered.
Not long after that, he crossed back into Idaho and stole another airplane and crash-landed it near Seattle.
As written in "The Times" article;
Since then he has been accused of stealing other planes for hops around the islands in the Puget Sound, including another Cessna belonging to a disc jockey who vented his frustration on radio, saying: “He still doesn’t know how to land a plane in one piece.”
He evaded a police pursuit by crashing a Mercedes-Benz into a roadside gas storage tank, using the explosion as a diversion to escape back into the woods where, he says, he feels like a Native American.
This was followed by the largest manhunt in recent memory. Three dozen sheriffs, aided by specialist armed units and an FBI helicopter, fanned out across Camano Island but failed to capture him. “We saw him, we think, but it’s like he disappeared in front of our eyes,” said one sheriff.
(snip)
For some Harris-Moore is a modern Butch Cassidy: a surprisingly agile 6ft 5in cat burglar who thanks his victims by leaving them notes and cheeky photographs of himself, which have sold for £300 on eBay.
Thousands subscribe to his Facebook page and his image appears on T-shirts with the logo “Fly, Colton, Fly!”. Local rock groups have penned songs about him.
Hollywood producers have lodged lucrative film deals with his family and offered to pay for lawyers if he gives himself up.
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Now the stakes have gone up; The Police accuse someone, Colton perhaps, of firing a rifle shot at them. It's possible, but it could be the hype produced by frustrated Cop syndrome. Up to this point, Colton has been completely non-violent.
Now, Colton's mother believes he might not make it out of the woods alive.
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