According to Colt, Pam was drunk and screaming at him throughout the incident. When he got away from Gordy, Colt ran into the trailer and called 911. That
When Island County deputies showed up, Gordy took off through the woods. He didn’t show the same fleet- footedness as his son, though, and they quickly caught him. “Colt had some scratches on his neck,” says Pam. “I said, ‘So what?!’ But they arrested [Gordy].”
Police reported that Pam “harangued and verbally abused the officers during the arrest,” and Colt said she kept after him when the deputies left, that she “stumbled around asking, ‘What are you going to do now? They’ve taken your father away.’”
When the police ran a check on Gordy, they found he was already wanted on an outstanding warrant. He was also charged and convicted of assault in the fourth degree for nettling Colt. (Washington police records do not show any accounts of Gordy Moore killing anyone. As of May 2011, though, he is a wanted man, with an active warrant for failing to appear at court for a DUI and driving with a suspended license. His criminal record also shows an arrest in Reno, Nevada.)
Child Protective Services received another referral after the barbecue donnybrook. A case worker came out to the trailer to check and see if Colton was okay.
“I told her, ‘He’s fine,’” says Pam. But the CPS counselor said she needed to actually see him with her own eyes. “Just then Colt came running around the side of the house and I said, ‘There he is, and if you want him, go ahead and take the little bastard, ’cause I’m not jumping through any friggin’ hoops!’ You know, drug testing or any of that crap. So she said, ‘Oh no, we just wanted to make sure he was okay.’ And she left.”
AT THIS POINT, DSHS recommended Pam get treatment for chemical dependency. She refused. A social worker suggested that Pam see a counselor at Compass Health. She said no thanks. A note in Colton’s record states: “Social worker has concerns regarding this child due to mother’s possible use of drugs or alcohol; this judgment due to the men and their habits that have been in Colton’s life.” But no action was taken.
COLTON BEGAN TO STRIKE back. When he got angry at Pam, he smashed the trailer’s windows, ultimately breaking most of them. He went into rages at her drinking and her smoking, and for things like playing the TV too loud when he was trying to sleep.
“I even got headphones for my TV and he’d swear he could hear it,” says Pam. “I said, ‘That is impossible.’ So he stuck a screwdriver where my headphones went and he messed it up so I couldn’t use it anymore. Yeah, he wasn’t very nice to me at times.”
Colton scrawled “Pam is a drunk” on the door to the laundry room and began taking full beer cans away from her and putting them out along the road.
IN SEVENTH GRADE AT Stanwood Middle School, Colton once again found some solace and friendship with a girl who was outside the popular cliques.
“Colt was in a few of my classes and it quickly became obvious that there were a lot of issues between him and the other kids,” says Brandi Blackford, a blue-eyed blonde with piercings in her eyebrow, tongue, and belly button who’d just moved from Portland to Camano Island. “He argued with people a lot. He’d make little comments at everything they said. He also told everyone that his mom was a lawyer and that they lived in a big, beautiful house, but kids who knew him would call him out on it.”
Colton wound up as Brandi’s lab partner in science class. He introduced himself to her as Colton Harris, dropping the part of his name that tied him to Gordy Moore.
“Behind the lies and all the drama you could see he just wanted a friend.” Brandi became that friend for a while. Her mom would drive over to Stanwood to pick them up from school and remembers having to wait outside in the car because Colton wouldn’t leave the building until all the buses had gone—“because of kids picking on him,” says Brandi.
On the weekends or anytime school was out, Brandi and Colton went to the beach with Melanie and Cricket, Brandi’s Jack Russell terrier. “Colton never wanted to go home.”
Colt’s time outside the trailer, though, wasn’t all spent in such agreeable activities as drawing his name in the sand with Brandi. On October 8, 2003, police caught Colton with a stolen cell phone, resulting in a possession of stolen property (PSP) in the third degree charge to which he pleaded guilty and got sentenced to probation. Then on Thanksgiving of that year, Colton celebrated the harvest festival in a nontraditional way. He and three other boys met up in Stanwood for an evening of mayhem. Armed with a butane torch lighter in the apparent belief that it would work like the plasma cutters crooks use to cut open safes in the movies, Colton went to work on the door of a Stanwood mortgage office. He scorched and melted the plastic frame a bit, but nothing more, so he went old school and pried on the door until a window broke. The boys grabbed a laptop and some blank CDs and moved on to the big Thrifty Foods supermarket, where they set fire to leaflets on the community bulletin board. Then came the big target, that hated bastion of teachers, books, and dirty looks: Stanwood Middle School.
Colton got them in by hammering on the gym doors and breaking a window. Inside, they used the torch on a Pepsi machine, melting the plastic face. On their way out, they set fire to an office window and then vandalized the bus barn before finally calling it a night.
One of the kids’ dads figured out the boys had been up to no good and marched his son down to the police station to spill. The cops called Pam, saying they wanted to come out and talk to her son. At the trailer, she pointed down the hall to his room, the first door on the right beyond the little living room. The police found the door not only closed, but padlocked.
Pam said she didn’t realize Colton wasn’t home. The padlock was no problem, though: she came down the hallway with a hatchet and chopped it off the door.
The deputies stormed into the room looking for the notorious juvenile delinquent and South End bully, but pulled up short: the top of Colton’s desk was piled high with stuffed animals. “Are these Colt’s?” the surprised officers asked Pam. She assured them that they were. The cops searched the room—no Colton, no laptop—but they spotted a Sony camcorder still in its box and a wallet carrying someone else’s identification. Pam told the police that Colton said he bought the video camera at a liquidation store. The cops called bullshit, so she phoned the store— which told her no, they’d never sold Sony camcorders.
The cops finally caught up with Colton at school and he was found guilty of malicious mischief in the third degree and burglary in the third degree. The break-in and vandalism became the sixth and seventh “incident reports” in Colton’s rapidly fattening file at Stanwood Middle. They suspended him for twenty-four days and charged him for his part of the damages. “Everybody in school knew him after that,” says Mike Bulmer. “They started calling him Klepto Colt.”
Colton’s legal troubles did nothing to smooth over things at home. He and Pam made it through Christmas, but fireworks erupted on New Year’s Eve. Colton now weighed 130 pounds and stood five foot four, big and heavy for a twelve-year-old. He was no longer afraid of Pam, and this time she was the one who dialed 911 and Colton who went running into the woods when the cops arrived. Pam pressed charges, and Colton pleaded guilty to assault 4, receiving a sentence of six months probation, thirty-six hours of community restitution (aka community service), and mandatory counseling, curfew, and urinalysis.
Two weeks later when his probation officer, Aiko Barkdoll, checked to see if Colton was following Pam’s “house rules,” she told him that he’d bitten her on the forearm and hit her. Pam said that when she tried to call the police about it, Colton had grabbed the phone out of her hand and broken it. She said he’d then chased her around the property with a boat oar, and that she’d escaped only by locking herself in her pickup. When Pam finally managed to call the cops, Colton again ran off into his woods.
When Barkdoll asked Colton about the incident, he admitted that he and Pam often got into physical fights and that his anger came from her “smoking and drinking beer.” Colton also showed him scratches where Pam had clawed his arm.
In his report, the probation officer noted: “Colton and his mother share a tumultuous relationship” and have difficulty resolving problems without aggression. He also made a call to Child Protective Services regarding Colton’s welfare. He noted that when he contacted CPS, the file on Colton was active (his was at least the ninth referral to CPS for abuse or neglect of Colton so far; there would be a dozen by the time he was fourteen). Still, Barkdoll said
