Chapter 12
In 1999, just after Colton turned eight, an event occurred that Pam says sparked his bad attitude toward the police. Though money was scarce, she’d scraped together $300 to buy him a new bike for his birthday. The bike became Colton’s prize possession, a symbol of independence and a vehicle for adventures, real and imaginary.
Pam was up on the trailer’s porch when an Island County Sheriff’s Office prowler pulled into the driveway with Colton in the backseat. She walked down and asked, “What’s up?” She says the deputy just got out, walked around his car, and popped the trunk. “Is this Colt’s?” he asked, pointing at the new bike.
“I got pissed!” says Pam. “I said, ‘Yeah, I just bought it for him!’ They figured ’cause we live in this dumpy trailer and must be dirt poor that how could Colt get a bike like that, well, he must have stole it.”
Pam remembers Colton being scared.
The sheriff’s office says they have no record of the incident, but don’t doubt that it happened. They say Camano-based deputies had already been hearing complaints about Colton from neighbors (nothing made it into official police records until two years later). “Based on his history and what the guys knew about him,” says Detective Ed Wallace, “I would not doubt that upon seeing Colton on a new bike that the guys would’ve wondered, Hey, what’s going on? and taken him home. I don’t doubt it happened at all. I just doubt whether that was the pivotal dramatizing event of his life.”
The police who worked Camano Island in the 1990s and early 2000s considered the South End a trouble spot, and not without reason.
“We had a slog of bad kids around here for a while,” says Jack Archibald. “Parents didn’t know how to teach them to be students. There were people like Pam, barely hanging on, doing their own thing, letting their kids run wild. The kids naturally looked for trouble and it was easy down here because most of us didn’t lock our doors.”
“There’s a real rugged side to things on the South End,” says Bonnie Bryand in her honey-barbecue Texas twang. Bryand moved to Camano in 1994 and raised three kids on the island, including a son named Kory who is the same age as Colton. “A lot of cooking was going on down here until about five years ago.” For a while, she says, it wasn’t unusual to find meth fixings that had been tossed into the ditches.
According to Bryand, drug and alcohol abuse and a lot of single-parent homes affected an entire group of Camano kids in Colt’s generation. “On top of the problems in the households, the kids had nothing constructive to do on the island.”
Camano suddenly had its homegrown version of the Dead End Kids as the children living at the bottom of the island became known as the South End Hoodlums. They began to attract a lot of attention from the police. “When I first moved here there was only one cop on duty for the whole island and you were lucky if he’d show up when you called,” says Bryand. “Then suddenly it seemed like we had four or five per shift and they were going after these kids real hard.”
Bonnie’s husband died in a car wreck while intoxicated, and her oldest son began running with the bored kids looking for trouble. She says that once the police identified someone they thought was bad, it was very hard for that kid to break out of the cycle. “If you lived anywhere near here, you got pegged.”
Two of the troubled kids Bonnie began to see around the neighborhood appeared to have all the cards stacked against them. One was the son of a meth addict. “His mom… I tried to help her out, but she got busted. When she got out of jail you couldn’t have her around, you couldn’t trust her. They lived in an old trailer house just falling down in the woods, and she had a lot of men in and out of there.” The tweaker’s son had a friend he ran around looking for trouble with: Colton Harris-Moore.
“Those two young boys, eight or nine years old, basically ran her house, always tearing things up and stealing stuff. Of course, her being a drug addict, she didn’t really care what they did.”
Though they lived less than two miles apart, Bonnie hadn’t met or heard of Pam, but she began to see a lot of Colton. “He was out running the streets on his own from a very young age.” Colt, she says, pushed himself into her kids’ groups. “He tried to fit in, but he was real aggressive, too rough, so nobody wanted to play with him and that’s when it became a problem. He wouldn’t take ‘No.’”
Bonnie has both a niece and a nephew diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and says she recognized a lot of those behaviors in Colton. “I don’t think he ever meant to be mean, but every day my daughter would come home crying because Colt had hurt her. I’d always tell her, ‘He’s just playing with you,’ which might have been the wrong thing to say. I didn’t see Colt as a demon, though. I liked him and always felt bad for him. The kids didn’t like him, but they had no understanding of what he was dealing with. Colt didn’t see that he was different.”
It wasn’t just the kids, though, who had a problem with Colt. “Everybody shunned him,” says Bryand. “Most parents didn’t want him in their house. The main problem was that he didn’t have any manners. They thought he was disrespectful, and he was, but you’re talking [about] a really young kid and I don’t think he intended to be. It was just all he knew.” Bonnie says that Colt would invite himself into her house. “I mean no knocking, no nothing, just walk in. And then he wouldn’t be interested in the kids or me. You could be talking to him, but he’d be in his own world looking at the things we had around the house. You had to keep an eye on him because he’d take things, and then he’d wind up breaking them.”
Colt also helped himself to her kids’ bikes. “He always stole bicycles. He would just go in your yard and take one. He thought he was just borrowing it.”
Bryand’s son Kory says Camano wasn’t a great place to grow up. He had troubles with the same set of kids over in Stanwood as Colt and Anne. “It was hard… not a lot of accepting people. Me being half Mexican, they made fun of me.”
With his own outcast and South End tinge, Kory seemed a likely friend for Colt. However, he says, “Colt was always difficult to get along with.” He describes Colt as primarily a loner, though says he would get to be friendly with one or another Camano kid for a while. However, the friendships would eventually sour. “Colt’s mouth would end it,” says Kory. “He loved to argue, usually pointless arguments, and he’d always wind up calling the other kids imbeciles. That was his favorite word.” Kory says most of the arguments started because of Colt’s tall tales. “He’d make up these unimaginable stories, huge lies about his dad being a pilot and having all these big houses. Everyone already knew what his life was like and that none of it was true. He always had tore-up raggedy clothes, shoes ripped apart… ”
Colt’s longest childhood friendship was with a boy named Joel who also lived on Road 25’55, which eventually got a real name, ironic at least where Colt was concerned: Haven Place.
“Nobody wanted Colt hanging around,” Joel says. “None of the kids liked him because he was constantly antagonizing people and he bullshitted so much that it was annoying. He once brought a rusty old key into school and said it was to his helicopter. I was like, ‘C’mon, man, I know that you and your mom live in this twenty-two-foot trailer just up the road. You don’t need to tell me you have a fucking helicopter.’”
Joel says that because of how Colt acted, “we’d wind up being good friends and then enemies, sometimes in the same day. I never knew what that meant, but from the time Colt was a little kid, my mom always said that he was going to do something crazy in his lifetime.”
Colt and Joel roamed the whole of the South End on foot and by bike. They explored the woods, built tree forts, and spent a lot of time playing army. “Colt was really into the Navy SEALs and special forces. He had a mentality like he was some kind of secret agent. He’d talk in code and he was always analyzing and plotting one step ahead.”
One of Colt’s quirks, says Joel, was the way he moved through the forest. “Whenever he’d run through the woods, he’d always take his shoes off and go barefoot. He said he was able to run better and be more agile that way.”
Joel vividly remembers stopping by Pam’s trailer when he was nine years old to see if Colt was home. “I knocked on the door and his mom answered with a shotgun in my face. That was pretty intimidating as a kid. After that, my mom was like, ‘You don’t need to be dealing with those people.’”
Neighbors on Haven tell a story from the same time, in the year 2000, when a Realtor and a contractor were preparing to build a home on the lot that backs up to Pam’s. The men were hunting for the property line markers and walked up to the trailer to ask if she knew where the corners were. According to neighbors, Pam’s answer was
