Colton Harris-Moore — a self-taught pilot run down on a Bahamian beach

In the dark before dawn on July 11, 2010, Bahamian police ran down a nineteen-year-old American fugitive in a stolen speedboat off Harbour Island, near Eleuthera in the Bahamas, and ended a two-year flight by firing into the boat’s engine until it stopped. The fugitive was Colton Harris-Moore, a teenager from Camano Island, Washington, whom the press had named the “Barefoot Bandit” for the bare footprints he sometimes left at burglary scenes. Cornered on the water, he threw a laptop overboard and briefly held a pistol to his own head before officers talked him down and took him into custody. He had crossed an international border in a single-engine airplane he did not know how to land, taught entirely by manuals, simulators and nerve.

Harris-Moore was not a professional criminal so much as a feral improviser. By the government’s account his spree ran through roughly eighty investigations across multiple states and into Canada and the Bahamas, turning on the theft of aircraft, boats, vehicles and firearms. He had taught himself the rudiments of flight from pilot handbooks, instructional videos and flight-simulator software, then stole light planes and flew them until the fuel ran out, walking away from crash landings that should have killed him. The arc that made him internationally infamous began on July 4, 2010, when a Cessna 400 vanished from an airport in Bloomington, Indiana, and surfaced days later as wreckage in the shoreline waters of Great Abaco Island, more than a thousand miles away.

The capture closed the legend but not the ledger. On June 17, 2011, Harris-Moore pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Seattle to six federal counts — bank burglary, interstate transportation of a stolen aircraft, interstate and foreign transportation of a stolen firearm, being a fugitive in possession of a firearm, piloting an aircraft without a valid airman’s certificate, and interstate transportation of a stolen vessel. He acknowledged causing victim losses of at least 1.4 million dollars and agreed to forfeit any money from telling his story.

On December 16, 2011, an Island County judge sentenced him on consolidated state charges drawn from three counties to a term exceeding seven years, and on January 27, 2012, a federal judge in Seattle imposed six and a half years to run concurrently. He was released in 2016. The “Barefoot Bandit” had been, throughout, a damaged adolescent who turned petty burglary into aviation, and aviation into an international manhunt, before a boat engine and a cordon of island police brought it to a stop.