Barefoot Bandit started life on the run as a boy

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Neighbours say his mother screamed things at him so vicious that they cringed when her words echoed through the island in Puget Sound.Long before stealing boats and planes made the Barefoot Bandit a marvel of elusiveness, Colton Harris-Moore, 19, was suspected of stealing cookies and frozen pizza from the Kostelyk family, a few gravel roads from the squalor that was his home, a trailer on a dead end here, barely an hour from Seattle. The Kostelyks had waterfront property and a freezer full of food. He lived inland and had nothing."We called him 'Island Boy'," recalled Linda Johnson, whose mother, was Maxine Kostelyk. "He came back over and over again - frozen pizza, cookies, ice cream."By the time he was captured on a stolen motorboat in the Bahamas last week, Harris-Moore had become a sensation. After escaping from a juvenile halfway house more than two years ago, he eluded the authorities across North America using his wits and his fleet feet. The police said he made makeshift homes in empty houses for days or weeks at a time and somehow taught himself to fly, mastering the art of crash-landing and walking away.For much of his life, Colton Harris-Moore was alone and hungry."He says he's not into any of that," said Monique Gomez, a lawyer who briefly represented Harris-Moore in the Bahamas. Gomez added, "I think if he had proper direction, he wouldn't have done what he did."Harris-Moore was often in conflict with his mother, Pam Kohler. According to public documents, child protection officials had been referred to the family at least a dozen times by the time Harris-Moore was 15.A social worker's report from the time he was first arrested, at 12, stated: "Colton wants Mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job and have food in the house... Mom refuses."Several neighbours on Haven Place recalled a hand-painted sign at the end of Kohler's driveway: "If you go past this sign you will be shot." Asked if it was an empty threat, a neighbour said, "She shoots."He is suspected of taking at least five planes - including once during the Vancouver Olympics - and crash landing all of them. He walked away each time.The Barefoot Bandit label stems from real footprints found at some crime scenes last year and drawings of footprints that the police believe Harris-Moore made at other scenes.Neighbours say they do have memories of Harris-Moore going barefoot at times when he was a boy. He seemed to be on a search for parental substitutes, asking people to make him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

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