Ms. Gomez added, “I think if he had proper direction, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

Mr. Harris-Moore had a volatile childhood and was often in conflict with his mother, Pam Kohler. His father appears to have been absent. According to public documents, child protection officials had been referred to the family at least a dozen times by the time Mr. Harris-Moore was 15.

Image Colton Harris-Moore in elementary school. He dropped out after the ninth grade.

A social worker’s report from the time he was first arrested, at 12, drew a succinct conclusion, at least from the boy’s point of view. “Colton wants Mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job and have food in the house,” the report said. “Mom refuses.”

When Mr. Harris-Moore was 4, someone reported Ms. Kohler after seeing “a woman grab a small child by the hair and beat his head severely,” according to a psychiatric summary 12 years later. By the time he was 10, an investigation involving “negligent treatment or maltreatment” had been initiated.

Ms. Kohler does not appear to have been prosecuted for a crime related to the complaints.

Ms. Kohler, 59, declined to be interviewed. A lawyer she has hired to handle news media inquiries and film and book proposals based on her son’s story said he had not seen allegations of abuse against Ms. Kohler in public records.

Several neighbors on Haven Place, the gravel road on the southern end of Camano Island where Mr. Harris-Moore grew up and his mother still lives, recalled often hearing mother and son screaming at each other into the night. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they feared Ms. Kohler.

A hand-painted sign at the end of her wooded driveway warns: “If you go past this sign you will be shot.”

Asked whether it was an empty threat, one neighbor said, “She shoots.”

The neighbor recalled a land surveyor telling how he had heard gunshots fired in his direction when he was surveying the property next door.