Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

Two days later, at around 2:20 a.m. on September 8, the woman working night crew at Island Market felt so ill that she had to go home. The person she’d normally call to replace her was on vacation and the stocking was finished anyway, so she decided not to bother waking anyone up. Every day of the year except for a couple of holidays, there’s someone inside Island Market twenty-four hours a day. Now, for one short, unforeseeable period, it was left unattended. As soon as the employee left, a burglar tried to get in the back shipping door. He couldn’t force it open, so he went around to the front of the building, where on many nights there’s a police cruiser loitering in the parking lot. Not that night, though.

He crept along the side of the building until he was underneath the surveillance camera that kept watch over the front door. At 2:35 a.m., he used a crowbar to tilt the camera up, and then retreated into the shadows to make sure no one was monitoring the feed and that he hadn’t tripped an alarm. At 2:50, he came back and broke open the sliding doors. He knew there were more security cameras inside, so he held his arm across his face and walked into the store, barefoot, carrying a crowbar and hammer.

The cameras watched the tall white kid head straight to aisle 6—toilet paper, paper towels, Ziplocs—but he didn’t stop to pick up any supplies. At the back of the aisle he turned right, walked along a huge display of cold beer without snagging any, then ducked through the swinging doors into the stock area. The burglar knew exactly where he was going. He climbed a metal shelving unit to reach a surveillance camera, and whacked it with his crowbar, knocking off the lens.

There’s a big Mosler safe back there, a monolithic old-timer like you’d see Butch and Sundance blow up with a pile of dynamite. The kid didn’t even bother to try that one. Instead, he walked back out through the produce department, leaving big bare footprints on the mats, and went through the unmarked door that leads upstairs to the bathrooms and the offices. He pried open each office door until he found the electrical box and, at 3:30 a.m., he turned off the store’s lights, which are normally left burning all night. He also broke into the room that housed the security system. Inside, he began pushing buttons on the equipment until the camera feeds went dark. What he didn’t know was that he turned off only the monitor. The cameras continued to see and the DVR continued to record as he went back downstairs to his real target.

Island Market’s little ATM stands at the front of the store just behind the facade’s huge plate-glass windows, near the bird seed and bags of charcoal. The machine is one of those stand-alones, four feet high and about eighteen inches square, with a molded plastic shell covering its steel body. It held about $8,000 that night, and it certainly looked like a breachable target if you had enough time and leverage. The crook went to work with his trusty crowbar and hammer. After many, many whacks, though, he hadn’t made much of an impact on anything except the plastic. To be fair, he was hampered a bit by bad visibility: sensing that the cameras might still be recording, he’d hung a T-shirt over his head and had to peek out through its neck hole as he moved around.

The burglar realized the ATM called for more firepower and he had an idea. He jogged back to the loading dock and grabbed the handle of a battery-powered pallet jack, aka a “jigger,” a baby forklift that lets its user pick up and move a thousand pounds with little effort. He walked it like a dog on a leash back to the front of the store, then lined it up and rammed it into the ATM… over and over and over.

He worked on the ATM for an hour and ten minutes, until the little money machine looked like R2-D2 after being humped by a Transformer. Its plastic housing was pried apart, cracked, and decapitated, and its metal body crumpled. But the money box held. Barely.

“A couple more hits to the door and it would have popped open, but he kept changing angles,” says Jason Linnes. What the burglar did succeed in doing, though, was gashing his hand on the sharp plastic. He bled like a stuck pig, on the machine, on the jigger, and all over the floor. At 4:30, he ran to the deli kitchen to wash his cut in the sink. The video then shows that he either saw lights or heard something outside—a police cruiser may have driven through the lot—because he suddenly crouched down by the baguette display and froze for a few moments. This allowed a ceiling camera to get a nice clean shot suitable for framing—or at least for a wanted poster.

The burglar popped back up, showing that he’d wrapped one of his T-shirts around his cut hand. He went directly to the cleaning aisle and picked up a bottle of bleach, which he poured over the blood on the floor, the ATM, and the pallet jack in order to make the blood useless for DNA testing.

At this point he looked at the watch he wore on his right wrist. It was 4:42 a.m., and he knew exactly when he needed to get out of Dodge. He left eighteen minutes before the morning crew arrived.

The staff discovered the assault and battery on their cash machine, but not one thing was missing except the bleach, which added about three bucks to the $12,000 worth of damage done to the store.

When the deputies arrived to take a report, the employees showed them the bare footprints and all the things that’d been touched. Then they walked them over to the deli. The burglar had forgotten about that, and there was very visible, very fresh blood all over the sink. At first, according to the supermarket staff, the cops said they weren’t going to bother collecting any of it for evidence. The employees and owner were furious, though—and also all on a first-name basis with the deputies. They demanded that they collect a sample. Finally, a deputy went for a forensics kit and took a DNA swab.

Long before those results came back, though, a San Juan County detective attended a monthly information-sharing meeting with other detectives from around the region. He told the assembled officers about the trouble his county was having with a suspect they’d nicknamed the Barefoot Bandit.

“I remember getting a chuckle out of that,” says Island County Sheriff’s Office detective Ed Wallace, who was at the meeting. Wallace, however, says the name didn’t ring any bells among the Island County contingent. It might have for regular readers of the county’s Stanwood/Camano News , though, since the paper’s front-page headline back in February 2007 had been: “Camano’s barefoot bandit caught.” The story was about a teenager named Colton Harris-Moore who’d been captured by the Island County Sheriff’s Office (ICSO) after evading them for six months on a small island while continuously breaking into homes to steal everything from food to jewelry. The local paper—as well as the Seattle Times and Everett Herald —had run quite a few additional Colton stories since then, including a flurry after his escape from detention in April 2008 and resumption of his thieving ways on Camano Island, which lay just thirty miles south of Orcas.

It all finally came together—at least for law enforcement—when a San Juan County detective sent images from the Island Market surveillance camera of the suspect posing by the baguettes. Island County recognized him right away.

“We felt like a doctor giving a patient bad news,” says Wallace. “We’re afraid you have a Colton Harris-Moore problem.”

ICSO gave the San Juan sheriff Colton’s file, including a recent portrait taken by Harris-Moore himself. The eighteen-year-old’s book-length rap sheet started once upon a time when he was ten. Island County warned Sheriff Bill Cumming that Colton had run their deputies ragged. And said that when they finally caught him and thought they’d rid their island by sentencing him to three years in prison, he’d escaped. The file also included the information that Colton liked to play with guns and often armed himself with pepper spray. Island County had already filed a slew of new felony charges against Colton for crimes he’d committed since going on the lam.