seven-month run was over.
THE COPS MIRANDIZED COLT and transported him to the Island County Juvenile Detention Facility. Colton didn’t have a firearm when he was taken into custody, though he was loaded for bear with another pepper spray canister. During questioning by a detective, Colton says he never had a gun on him, just a knife, but the cop asked about three specific handguns—a .45 Ruger, a Glock, and a Walther PPK. “You guys don’t need to worry about that,” Colton told him. “They’re not going to be taken out, you know, shot at people and everything.”
When the detective pressed about a .45 caliber slug found in one of the houses he was staying in, Colton told him, “I wasn’t the one who shot the gun. I’m the big fish in the pond… Well, I’m not the big fish in the pond. That’s all I have to say. You can talk to Harley [about the guns] because he’ll be more willing to talk than I am because, you know, he doesn’t care if people come after him, so let him get chased and shot and everything… I don’t even know what stole property you’re talking about… I’m not the connected one here who knows where everything is… I’m not going to tell anybody because of my personal safety and my mom’s that need to be put into consideration in this… They’ve threatened to dispose of her truck and my dog.”
Aside from these shadowy figures, Colton’s main worry was the media, which he universally refered to as “the paparazzi.” He told the detective, “I just don’t want this to be on the news.”
The following day, Sheriff Mark Brown held a “We got him!” town hall meeting at the Camano Grange. It wasn’t a victory parade. He faced tough questions from the large crowd who wanted to know why it took so long and why he hadn’t caught Harley yet. Everyone, though, was happy Colton was finally in custody and most were glad it ended peacefully.
Following Colton’s capture, Dave Pinkham wrote an editorial in the
A FEW DAYS LATER, Harley saw the writing on the wall—or, more accurately, saw wanted posters on every wall that now featured just his mug on them. He turned himself in. When a detective asked about the night he and Colton were in a home and the deputies jumped out at them, Harley said Colt had a Ruger .45 pistol, but that it wasn’t loaded. When the detective asked why he ran when the deputy told him to stop, Harley answered, “Old habits.”
In March, Harley pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal trespass and second-degree taking a motor vehicle without permission. He was sentenced to “up to 50 weeks” in a juvenile facility.
Colton had a more complicated path through the juvenile justice system. He was charged with twenty-three crimes against a dozen victims. Counts included theft, obstructing a law enforcement officer, and multiple counts of residential burglary, computer trespass, and possession of stolen property. Colt was held on $10,000 bail, which a judge then raised to $35,000. That didn’t matter, though: no one was going to spring him. Pam said, “I don’t ever bail anybody, I don’t care who it is.”
As Colton approached the courtroom for his first hearing—buzz-cut hair and wearing an orange jumpsuit and sandals with white socks, hands cuffed to a waist belt and chains around his ankles—he peeked inside the door and instantly reared back. He’d spotted the photographers and a TV camera. “Paparazzi,” he groaned.
Along with what they felt was plenty of evidence—much of it from the stolen property found at his campsite on Pam’s property—the prosecutor’s office filed impact statements in which victims told of still-missing favorite pieces of jewelry, having to pay large insurance deductibles, feeling insecure in their homes. One mother wrote of having to console her young children for weeks after a fire had been set in their home, allegedly as a diversion when they came home and surprised the burglar, who ran past the kids as he escaped.
One woman, whose property was found at Colton’s campsite and whose fifty-five-year-old husband died of a heart attack about a week after the burglary, wrote that he’d “defiled the sanctity of our home. Hopefully the sentence will help and not hurt.”
The court appointed Rachel Miyoshi, who’d been in practice for four years, as Colt’s defense attorney. Like most adults who spent time with Colton, Rachel immediately liked the teen and found him very smart. Rachel hired Shauna Snyder, a private investigator, to help with the case. Between working as a PI and a paralegal, Shauna had twenty years of experience doing defense research and had worked a lot of juvenile cases. She considered Colton the poster child for someone marked for attention by the local police after getting into trouble at a young age. “I think that Pam gave him some of that bad reputation with the police, too, because she’s such a hard-ass.” Shauna says she’d never met someone quite like Pam, who showed up with both barrels blazing.
“She wasn’t the most receptive to listening,” says Shauna. “And she is distrustful, so it was hard to explain to her that they had stuff on him. She had this thing that he’s just getting the blame, a scapegoat, that he didn’t really do it. Ironically, though, she was the one that turned him in for most of it. She turned him in for the tent that was on the property with all the stolen stuff. They didn’t have a clue about that. Had she not, they never would have had any of it. I mean, she hurt him.”
Still, Pam was adamant that Colton should not plead guilty to anything. “Pam would come into the office threatening to kick everyone’s ass… ‘Fuck them, blah blah blah.’ But then I’d talk to her, and by the time she left she’d be offering to take us all out for beers,” says Shauna. “So we got along great. She was engaged in the case and she was genuinely concerned. And it seemed to me like she’s the only one Colton gave a shit about. He understood that his mom was like who she was. But you know… it’s his mom.”
Shauna reviewed the police work: “Sloppy… and the reports are like illiterate. He probably did all these things, but they just didn’t have the evidence.” She says the county was also looking for victim restitution of around $36,000. “We whittled that down to something like $600 just by tracking who got their stuff recovered.”
When she went to the juvenile detention facility for her first meeting with Colton, Shauna didn’t know what to expect. “Some kids are kinda scary. You’re sitting locked in the cage with them and who knows if the jailer is around. Or else the kid might put on an attitude—‘Fuck the cops,’ or ‘I can do thirty days standing on my head’— acting rough and tough to cover that they’re shaking inside. But Colton wasn’t like either of those. He had no pretense. He was unassuming, polite, very calm, and stoic.”
The only time Shauna saw Colton react strongly was when partway through that three-hour first meeting a guard brought in his lunch. “He said, ‘I’m not going to eat this crap,’” she says. “And it did look like shit, some kind of bean medley. He said, ‘I’ll drink the juice,’ then he put the rest of the cafeteria tray on the ground like dog food.”
Shauna says that at first Pam had Colton convinced that the county didn’t have much on him. “I told him, ‘They don’t have you for all of it, but they’ve nailed you for some of it. Let me walk you through,’ and I meticulously showed him page by page.” She says Colton sat calmly and didn’t say much until she explained how they nailed him for his Web usage. “He wanted to see how they did the IP mapping, and how they’d subpoenaed the email records. Some of the Internet providers refused to give their records to the police, and he was very interested in knowing which ones.”
Shauna’s overall impression of Colton was that he was “a nice kid” and nothing like the sociopaths she’d dealt with before. “The vandalism stuff like the fire and the shot fired in the house, that only happened when Harley was there, not when Colton was on his own,” she says.
In preparing his defense, Rachel Miyoshi reviewed not only Colton’s criminal record, but also his school, health, and CPS files. In April, the court approved her request to hire Delton Young, PhD, at county expense. Bellevue-based Dr. Young is a psychologist with thirty years’ experience, including nine years at Harvard Medical School. He’s also the author of the book
Dr. Young reviewed all the records and then met with Colton for interviews and testing, which included an IQ exam, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. His report states: “Given that Colton has only superficially participated in school for several years, these scores are reasonably strong and suggest that his intellectual capacities are easily in the average range.” He also found the now-sixteen-year-old Colton to be relatively mature.
The full evaluation, filed June 15, referred to the dozen Child Protective Services reports and covered Colton’s
