the guards. “Three or four weeks prior to his release, there were notes in Colt’s tracking saying that he should be considered an escape risk because he’s making escape plans.”
There’s no question on the CRA form that asks, “Is the ‘client’ planning an escape?” However, the tracking notes would have been part of the overall review before Colton was released to a group home. Even if his scores weren’t high enough to keep Colton in the secure facility, there was one fail-safe built into the form, an “administrative override” that could have denied his release. “There’s no way he should have passed,” says a staffer, “but they went ahead and released him.”
Unfortunately for Colton, his plan worked. At Green Hill, he’d been attending classes and doing relatively well. He was reading college-level psychology books and studying more about flying. He wasn’t taking full advantage of the therapy offered, but maybe a little more time would have brought about a breakthrough. His buddy Josh, who’d also been a dropout, walked away after spending a full three years at Green Hill with a GED, a clean slate, and a determination not to get into trouble again.
There’s no telling if more time would have rehabilitated Colt—but it might have. What’s certain is that releasing him when written records showed he was actively planning an escape set the stage for dozens of additional victims and millions of dollars in damages and costs associated with Colt’s next run.
ON VALENTINE’S DAY 2008, just over a year after he was arrested and about seven months after he’d been sent to Green Hill, Colton was transferred to the Griffin Home Residential Treatment Center. Griffin sits on a nicely wooded six acres just across the railroad tracks from the shore of Lake Washington in Renton, a Seattle suburb. He was placed in a homelike setting with eleven other boys and given a routine similar to that at Green Hill, with schooling, therapy, and behavior classes.
The residence’s doors are alarmed and kids are supposed to be under twenty-four-hour supervision, but security is low-key by design. Group homes are transitional phases between prison and the community, providing boundaries and structure while easing offenders back into society. For someone like Colton, it could offer a nice, safe place to live, more education, and more counseling to help him overcome his socialization issues. For someone like Colton, though, it was also still a cage.
Colton began grumbling shortly after he got to Griffin. He called Pam to complain about the drug and alcohol classes they made him attend even though he didn’t have a substance-abuse problem. “He said, ‘Mom, do I have to go?’ And I told him just do what they tell you,” remembers Pam. Colton also told her that the counselors were trying to “brainwash” him via therapy.
If the brainwashing was to convince Colton that there were more important things in life than money and the trappings of wealth, it didn’t work. While in Griffin, he created a remarkably prescient collage from photos, words, and phrases clipped out of magazines. It even has the words “Buyer’s Guide” pasted in. Topped with “World of Comfort and Style” and an image of a twin-engine business jet captioned “May I Have Another,” the collage has one hopeful self-identifier, “Profession: Pilot.” The rest is: “Money, Money,” “Wealth,” “Dollars,” “Keep It,” “Get More,” “Passion,” “Enjoy the Taste,” “Live Richly.” “Make Money, Not Mistakes.”
The artwork includes a stack of gold bars, a Jet Ski, three smartphones, two cruise ships, and a yacht. The largest single image is a Rolex. Fashion-wise, Colton added the logos of Gucci, Chanel, Hugo Boss, DKNY, Guess, and Armani (whose products appear twice), all adjacent to the word “Sexy.” For his idea of suitable transportation, there were images of a Porsche, Lexus, Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Lincoln, as well as two Cadillac symbols, and right below a martini (presumably shaken, not stirred), the logo for Aston Martin, James Bond’s favorite getaway car. Dead center is a cruise ship with a line below it saying “See what you’re missing.” There are tourism logos for Mexico and the Caribbean. To pay for it all, Colton included a baker’s dozen of credit cards.
The collage, laminated on regal purple construction paper, is shockingly crass-spirational, a two-dimensional episode of MTV
The only two things that didn’t quite fit with all the bling were a large image of a piece of strawberry cheesecake and a small photo of a border collie. The artwork screamed of everything Colton felt he’d been denied and was determined to get. On the back it also showed a quiet protest: he signed it “Colton Harris-,” actually leaving the hyphen but dropping his attachment to Gordy Moore.
Pam says she went to visit Colton “in all the slammers,” though the memories kind of run together for her. At one, she brought him some new clothes. “Of course he told me exactly what to get… and just the shoes were a hundred dollars!” Another time she carefully packed along a robin’s egg that she’d found. “We used to go looking for them in the spring, so I asked the guard if I could give it to him… They said no, so I could only show it to him through the glass.”
Colton told Pam he was having headaches from the lighting in Griffin. She says they had a doctor see him, but not an optometrist like he wanted. As a solution, she says, they let him wear sunglasses inside. Then on Monday, April 28, he called home and told Pam they wouldn’t let him wear his shades anymore, presumably because it was causing problems with the other kids.
The following evening, after less than eleven weeks at Griffin Home, Colton pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, laced up his white Adidas, and snuck out a window between bed checks. The windows weren’t alarmed, and staff didn’t realize he was gone until an hour later. Griffin called the local police at 10:40 p.m. to report the escape. They also phoned Pam.
“A guard called me to say Colt left,” she remembers. “I just said, ‘Son of a bitch.’”
Part 3
TAKING FLIGHT
Chapter 21
Colton’s escape from Griffin was a local news item the next day, which is how, Ed Wallace says, the Island County Sheriff’s Office first heard about it. As far as anyone knew, he was safely tucked away for another twenty- two months. Sheriff Mark Brown immediately reactivated his E-lert system to tell Camano residents to lock up and keep a lookout. He and other county officials didn’t hide their displeasure.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says prosecutor Greg Banks. “This is a kid who was very good at running away and eluding police… Didn’t they know how hard it was to catch him the first time? Now we have to do it all over again?” Banks and the sheriff suspected that Colton would head home to Camano. “That’s where he was comfortable and that’s where he was successful,” says Banks. “The woods and all those empty vacation homes were still there.”
Josh Flickner, whose family owns the Elger Bay Grocery at the top of the South End, and who served as head of the local chamber of commerce, says the residents were outraged. “It was ‘You did
Pam heard from Colt soon after his escape. “I think as soon as he left he was sorry,” she says. “The way he was talking it sounded like he regretted it.” Pam, for once, found herself in agreement with Sheriff Mark Brown— they even spoke—and they both relayed through the media calls for Colton to turn himself in. If he had, he would have been sent back to Green Hill with another twenty-eight days tacked on to his original sentence. He would also have had a tougher time scoring low enough to be released to another group home before serving his full sentence. But that’s all he had hanging over his head at that point: his original time plus a month.
Colton had choices. He could go back to juvenile prison for about two years, pay his dues, and then try to move on with his life. Or he could leave the area and attempt to start over—not easy for a seventeen-year-old with no money, no job skills, not even a driver’s license, but kids run off and try it every day. Or he could head back to Camano, where he’d instantly be “most wanted” and be right back playing nonstop hide-and-seek with the cops.
Getting back into the game had to be attractive in some respects. Colt had been successful for a long time
