Barefoot Bandit Put a Gun to His Head

Weapon charge could complicate his case in the Bahamas
By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 12, 2010 9:51 AM CDT
Updated Jul 12, 2010 10:58 AM CDT

As cops shot out the engine on his getaway boat and the noose tightened on his 2-year crime spree, Colton Harris-Moore desperately chucked his laptop and iPhone into the water—and put a gun to his own head, reports the LA Times. "He was saying he was going to kill himself," says the manager of the resort where the Barefoot Bandit played his final game of cat-and-mouse. "But they talked him out of it, subdued him, and brought him back to our marina."

But the fact that Harris-Moore was packing heat, though he didn't use it, could make his case "much more complicated," the lawyer his mother has hired tells CBS. Should the Bahamas choose not to hit him with a weapons charge, "then his sentence structure would be very low, actually," says John Henry Browne. "But maybe everybody wants their pound of flesh." And Harris-Moore's notoriety isn't going to help him, Browne says: Normally, he'd be facing "three or four years" if prosecuted in federal court, but here he could be facing "between four and 12 years."
(More Barefoot Bandit captured stories.)

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