06/01/2026
Colton Harris-Moore grew up in a falling-apart trailer on Camano Island, Washington. His father left when he was a toddler. His mother struggled. There was rarely enough food.
So he started stealing it.
At first it was just survival. He broke into vacation homes while the owners were away and lived inside them for days at a time, eating their food, sleeping in their beds, watching their television. He was 13 years old.
Then he found the flight manuals.
Colton had never been in a cockpit. He had no training, no license, no instruction of any kind. But he had stolen aviation manuals from the homes he broke into and had spent hundreds of hours playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. He decided that was enough.
He was right.
His first stolen plane barely made it off the ground. By the third one he was flying cross-country in the dark. By the time the FBI got serious about catching him, he had stolen 6 aircraft, 19 cars, 11 boats, and broken into over 34 homes across three countries. He always committed his crimes barefoot. He left his footprints at every scene on purpose.
The FBI put a $10,000 bounty on him. He was being hunted by the FBI, Homeland Security, the Canadian Mounties, and the Bahamian Defense Force simultaneously.
He had 80,000 Facebook fans cheering him on.
While on the run in Washington he stopped at a veterinary clinic, slipped $100 through the door with a handwritten note that said "Please use this money for the care of animals." He signed it.
His final act was stealing a Cessna in Indiana and flying it solo across the ocean to the Bahamas. He crash-landed in a mangrove swamp. He kept running. Police eventually cornered him at a marina, shot out his boat engines and and arrested him in the water at 3am.
He was 19 years old.
He was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison. Fox 2000 Pictures paid $1.3 million for his movie rights. Every dollar went to his victims.
