A Close Brush with a Barefoot Bandit

I’d heard it in passing, but never really paid any attention.  “The Barefoot Bandit” – it’s a catchy moniker assigned to a kid who escaped from some group home in Washington state.

This boy, this 19 year old kid, has fled across the country, eluding police, stealing what he needs to survive. At times, it’s been the use of a bathtub. Other times, a vehicle.

A few times now, it’s even been aircraft.

Yep. Aircraft. Planes. This 19 year old, with no formal training, has managed to reach a point where on more than one occasion he has stolen an airplane, and successfully flown it to a new destination.

Over the holiday weekend, he apparently decided to steal one from here. From an airport where I spent much of my childhood. Where members of my family have made a living. From an airport that is a four-mile drive from my house, and it’s only that far because I have to circle all the way around it to get to it’s entrance. It’s maybe a mile and a half as the crow flies. MAYBE. Three houses and a wooded area.

The current assumptions are this – Colton Harris-Moore, a.k.a. "The Barefoot Bandit”, stole a vehicle in Illinois, which was found dumped in a church parking lot not far from the airport. (They haven’t released the name of the church that I’m aware of, but I think it’s a small church very close to where the kids’ attend school.) A few days after the discovery of the car, an aircraft was stolen from a hangar at our local airport, and crashed in shallow waters off the coast of the Bahamas.

He’s not hurt anyone physically so far, in fact, his wiki page indicated a bit of a giving heart when he stopped by a veterinarian’s office, but the idea that this kid was so close to my home, that he was able to steal a plane that I may well have seen fly past my house, it just leaves me a bit stunned. So, so many more thoughts in my head about this, but I won’t drag it all out.

So, that was the interesting thing that happened here over the holiday weekend. How about at your place?