(3 of 4)
Tom had always commanded attention. Even as a first-grader, he would go over to neighbor kids' homes and crack jokes that made parents chuckle. He often sketched, and people thought he would one day be a cartoonist, maybe--something special. But no one was ready for Tom's next act. Not even Tom.
O.K., friends admit, he sometimes didn't know where to draw the line. He was always cracking jokes at others' expense. "He liked to hit them when they were down," says Bill Cromley, Tom's high school Japanese teacher. He liked provoking a woman who clerked at 7-Eleven with sexual wisecracks. Fat kids got it too.
Tom and Ethan fed off each other. They were "feisty, defiant--I don't want to say it, but O.K., borderline a_______," says Joe Simpson, the school's hulklike vice principal and disciplinarian (who suspended Tom at least once). "Together, they were bad for each other. Some say Tom looked up to Ethan for his size"--Tom is shorter and 20 lbs. lighter--"but in terms of being a risk taker, Tom is at the top of the list." They were tight, but they were also competitive in the way that a lot of young male friends are. Tom had more money, but Ethan was cooler; they each had something the other wanted. And armed robbery, in its way, gets you both.
Even though police had been suspicious of Ethan's self-inflicted wound, it took them months to fully link the Chevy Suburban to the Rustica robbery and then to Ethan--and weeks more to confirm the connection with DNA tests. But by the following spring, authorities were finally ready to move. On April 16, 1998, they arrested Ethan at school.
Tom's world was about to collapse--he surely knew Ethan would tell all when faced by menacing prosecutors--but few knew why. Tom and Ethan had told almost no one about the full scope of their extracurriculars. Tom wanted to run, but Jenny begged him to stay for the prom the next night. It was a heart-wrenching, five-hour conversation. Tom was obviously in big trouble, but Jenny didn't know how much. In the end, Tom went to the prom, though friends say he and Jenny looked miserable the whole night.
Tom vanished after that, for months. He stayed in Portland mostly, sleeping at a friend's place or in Washington Park, showering at the Multnomah Athletic Club. There was no plan; he just stayed a step ahead, carrying a bag of his stuff and scraping by on a few bucks here and there. Inexplicably, it took several days for police to issue a warrant for his arrest. So, when his parents and friends helped him at first, they weren't breaking the law. But after the warrant was issued, the cops hunted him with increasing fervor. One time the entire robbery detail (which had been reconstituted) rode around the park on mountain bikes in the rain, trying in vain to find him.
But what most tantalized Portlanders about the story, what put it on the front page, was what happened next. Since early in the year, a bunch of Grant kids--upper-middle-class ones mostly, Tom's cohort--had been planning a June trip to Mazatlan, Mexico. Word got out that Tom might go. Authorities talked about sending someone there, but decided against it--they're the local cops, after all, not the FBI. Did they even have jurisdiction?