CAMANO ISLAND — While SWAT teams searched the woods near Granite Falls on Monday for signs of a burglary suspect who shot at sheriff’s deputies, a similar team of police scoured the woods near the Camano Island home of Colton Harris-Moore’s mother.
“We just took the initiative,” Island County sheriff’s detective Ed Wallace said. “With the possibility of what might be going on, we decided to take a look and see if he might be popping back on the island.”
There’s been a burst of bizarre criminal activity stretching from the San Juan Islands through British Columbia to northern Idaho and back to Snohomish County in the past few weeks which some officials have linked to the notorious teenage fugitive.
Officials have said they believe Harris-Moore taught himself to fly small planes. The teen is accused of pirating motor boats throughout the San Juan Islands and to the mainland. Someone stole shoes, blankets and food from a home near Granite Falls on Sunday — a theft with the earmarks of the teenager whose history includes evading police and sleeping in the woods.
The discovery of a crashed stolen plane near Granite Falls last week followed Sunday by the break-in — and the shot fired at deputies — have many speculating that Harris-Moore could be now be armed and escaping arrest through thousands of acres of forested wilderness.
That led Island County officials to keep a close watch on his mother’s house.
“They figured Colt would come here,” his mother, Pam Kohler, said.
Harris-Moore’s dog, which the teen left in his mother’s care, smelled police lurking outside the home, Kohler said. The dog started barking, alerting her to the SWAT team lurking in the woods around her south Camano Island mobile home.
“Don’t even waste your time,” Kohler said she told the deputies. “He’s not dumb.”
Kohler scoffs at the idea that her son is responsible for all the crimes that have been pegged to him.
Still, with so many police looking for the boy, she’s concerned he’ll be killed.
“I’m really afraid for his safety,” she said.
Snohomish County officials can’t yet say who is responsible for the stolen plane found Oct. 1 or Sunday’s burglary.
“We’re waiting for evidence to be processed,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Rebecca Hover said. “We have to keep all the possibilities open.”
In the meantime, local airports have been notified to be alert, she said.
Catching a criminal suspect in a dense wilderness can be very difficult, experts said.
“It’s not unusual for someone to be on the lam for a long time,” said David Klinger, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and a senior research scientist at the Police Foundation in Washington, DC.
Patience, good detective work and a bit of luck likely will lead to the teen’s arrest, he said.
“You have to hope he makes a mistake, and he will eventually,” Klinger said.
Eric Robert Rudolph, the man accused of a series of deadly bombings in the 1990s, spent five years on the run, despite being featured on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He eventually was captured scavenging for food from a dumpster.
Whoever is lurking in the Snohomish County woods must have some survival skills.
Temperatures in the foothills outside Granite Falls have dipped to near freezing the past few nights, National Weather Service meteorologist Art Gaebel said.
“That’s pretty chilly,” he said.
Before Harris-Moore’s arrest in February 2007, he spent about six months running from Island County sheriff’s officials. Some people claimed the boy ran barefoot through the woods and slept in trees.
More likely Harris-Moore broke into vacant homes and slept on couches. The teen finally was cornered when an alert neighbor noticed lights on in a home and called 911.
The boy was sentenced to three years in juvenile lock-up. He slipped out of a secure facility in April 2008 and has been a fugitive since.
Now, detectives from around the region likely are pooling their notes and trying to anticipate what the suspect might do next, said Levi Montgomery, who teaches law enforcement tactics at his Basetac Training Center in Tennessee.
“They’re trying to determine some method to his madness,” Montgomery said.
Careful, step-by-step police work should lead to an arrest.
“There’s no magic to it, it’s very methodical and time consuming,” he said.
Reporter Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3437 or jholtz@heraldnet.com.
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