EVERETT — As a lanky teenager, Colton Harris-Moore made international headlines during a two-year crime spree that stretched from the Pacific Northwest to the Bahamas.
Now, nearly six years after a high-speed boat chase ended in his arrest in the Caribbean, the man once known as “The Barefoot Bandit” has only months left on his sentence. But that could be more time than his mother, Pam Kohler, has left, he said.
Weakened by pneumonia and anemia, Kohler also is fighting advanced lung cancer. She has little money and few options, and, according to Harris-Moore, most of the doctors and nurses caring for her seem unable to help her.
“If I was free, none of that would have happened” to his mom, he said in telephone interviews earlier this week.
But he isn’t free. He is at Stafford Creek Corrections Center near Aberdeen, serving federal and state sentences from a string of burglaries that included stealing and flying five single-engine airplanes and as he dodged police. He’s slated to go to a halfway house in Seattle on work release at the end of July, according to his attorney, John Henry Browne.
“That’s a lifetime as far as I’m concerned,” Harris-Moore said.
Prison has been the “worst experience” of his life, he said. But “I would do another 10 years in prison if it meant my mom could live.”
The 25-year-old has always owned up for his actions. At his sentencing in state court, Superior Court Judge Vickie Churchill noted that he showed remorse for his crimes and had already taken steps to repay victims.
“That is the triumph of the human spirit and the triumph of Colton Harris-Moore,” she said at the sentencing in 2011. “He has survived.”
At the time Browne, people following the trial and many commentators in the media blamed Kohler for her son’s crimes. They pointed to a tumultuous childhood punctuated with abuse, neglect and uncertainty.
Her son disagrees, though.
“She did the best she could” as a mother, he said. “I don’t think she has a very good benchmark to measure a good job against.
“Everyone wants to blame everything” on her, but “I made my own choices,” he said.
His mother had a tough life and battled depression, which she self-treated with alcohol, he said. “She’s like anybody else. She has hopes and dreams and problems.”
While court records include concerns about drinking, physical abuse and neglect, they also show a mother who pushed school officials and others time and again to help her son. There were camping trips to the mountains, the San Juan Islands and on Camano Island, where he grew up. He said he has plenty of happy memories of crabbing at the beach and barbecuing in the back yard.
Kohler encouraged her son’s passion for airplanes. Over the years they made several trips to the annual air show in Arlington, and she took him to the Museum of Flight in Seattle “two or three times,” he said.
His mother also taught him to love animals. Growing up, they had dogs, cats, pigs, two goats and chickens.
“She always said she wanted a couple horses,” he said.
“There are things I hold against” my mom, “but I love her, and I’m going to do everything in my power to help her,” he said.
He and Sandi Puttmann, Kohler’s sister and his aunt, have been coordinating her medical care since she was diagnosed with lung cancer last year. Three months ago, doctors told her she has six months to live, he said.
They had her moved to the Tri-Cities, where she has family, but the oncologist there seemed to see little hope for her, he said. He told them “basically to plan for her death.”
It took more than a week to have a biopsy done, Harris-Moore said. When the results came back, the medical staff did not review them for three weeks, he said.
Frustrated by the apparent disinterest in treating her, Harris-Moore searched for another option and found Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
Puttman and Harris-Moore arranged to have Kohler travel back to Seattle and set up an appointment at SCCA in mid-March. The doctors there offered a ray of hope to the family. SCCA staff proposed pursuing a cancer treatment in a clinical trial, he said.
SCCA declined to say if Kohler is or is not a patient.
Since late March, Kohler has been at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, where she is being treated for pneumonia and anemia. Harris-Moore said he feels more aggressive treatment can be pursued.
Providence staff assured him and Puttman that Kohler would be taken to an appointment at SCCA, but for some reason that didn’t happen, he said.
Providence officials confirmed that Kohler is a patient and Wednesday reported that she was in satisfactory condition. They did not respond to questions about the concerns raised by her son.
Every hour, every minute, matters to her chances, Harris-Moore said.
From the Tri-Cities to Everett, the phrase he hears the most from her doctors on the phone is “I don’t know,” he said.
And he doesn’t know if she will be there when he gets out of prison to begin work release in Browne’s law office at the end of July. Visiting his mother before then is possible, but very difficult and costly, his attorney said.
Since his mother’s diagnosis, every day in prison has become a “nightmare,” Harris-Moore said.
Last year, his dog, Melanie, died. He only loves his mother more than he did Melanie, he said. “By the time I get out of jail, everything I loved might well be dead.”
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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