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If not this week, then soon, Tom will almost certainly also plead guilty to several counts of armed robbery. Pleading means saying yes to 11 years in prison; when you're 19, that's hard to do. The ordeal has driven Tom's mom into deep despair and his friends into bewilderment. "It's still so unreal to me," says his girlfriend Jenny, now at college. "Tom is not the type of person who I could ever fathom would say, 'We're going to rob this place: you drive, you hold the gun, you take the money.' It's just unreal." So what went wrong?
You spend half your time in high school trying to be cool and the other half worrying about tests and practice and college. It's awful. But what if it isn't? What if kids worship you, as they did Tom, because he stands up to cops who tell students they can't loiter in the street at lunch hour? What if you jog with your coach because he likes you, and success comes easily in extracurriculars, and even when you doze in class, which is kind of often because you're so busy. You wake up with a joke that sets the classroom giggling? What if high school is not terrifying but a breeze?
On Nov. 10, 1996, Tom and Ethan were a couple of months into their junior year. That night, Tom and an unnamed accomplice (investigators say it was Ethan) took a gun to a Howard Johnson's, pointed it at manager Martin Davidson and started counting to 10. Davidson nervously handed over the money, and they were gone. Fifteen days later, according to his indictment, Tom struck again, this time at a Baskin Robbins. Then again the day before New Year's Eve, at a Burger King, where Ethan worked--which was convenient, since Tom didn't have to case the place. Then Baskin Robbins again, victimizing the same unfortunate scooper, a woman said to have nightmares still. But by this time, the boys surely had a feel for it, and if they felt for the victims, they could console themselves by rationalizing that no one was getting shot.
Though the boys stupidly kept robbing near school, which would later create a tidy pattern for prosecutors, they got more creative, more ambitious. They enlisted others, four in all, to serve as drivers or fellow gunmen. There was Todd Seymour, son of a former deputy D.A. in town, a gentle, bright child whose involvement stunned everyone the most. And Celia Reynolds, who met Ethan in middle school and considered him almost a brother. But usually it was just Tom and Ethan, who were careful and lucky. They kept things small time: a natural-foods market, a Barnes & Noble, a goofy New Age store.
It's surprising, though, that they didn't get caught sooner. To save money, the police bureau disbanded its robbery unit in June 1997; no one was examining theft patterns--geography, m.o., gun descriptions. Ten minutes on a crime-mapping computer in New York City might have stopped Tom and Ethan much faster. They were almost nabbed once: neighbors called police to say two boys were casing a Blockbuster store. When cops arrived, the boys escaped on foot (thank you, track team). One dropped a loaded .357 magnum handgun. Later, when the local Willamette Week broke the story of the robbery spree, the cop from the Blockbuster incident recognized Tom and Ethan's pictures on the front page.