From a young age, no one could tame Evan Ebel

DENVER From a young age, no one could tame Evan Spencer Ebel.

His parents sent him to special camps in Utah, Jamaica and Samoa for children with behavioral problems. Neighbors in the middle-class suburbs west of Denver shied away from a kid they described as “a handful.”

By age 20, state prison had become Ebel’s home. There, he joined a white supremacist gang and ended up in solitary confinement, a place his parents believe soon began to eat away at his already troubled mind.

On Jan. 28, when his term was up, Ebel was set free.

Two months later, he is dead after a shootout with Texas authorities and is a suspect in the death of Colorado’s state prisons chief, who was gunned down when he answered the front door of his house. Investigators have said the gun used to in the Texas shootout was the same weapon used to kill Colorado’s prisons chief.

Now investigators are trying to piece together whether the final actions of the 28-year-old sprung from his own ideas or came at the direction of a prison gang — an idea some close to him reject.

His mother, Jody Mangue, says her son was more complicated than news media stories imply.

“He was not a follower by any means,” she posted in an online memorial site, suggesting that white inmates are often labeled members of such gangs even if they don’t join.

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The Colorado Independent website quoted a former inmate and member of the prison gang who said Ebel had left the group and was having a hard time integrating back into society.

“He told me that he needed to release some anxiety,” the former inmate, Ryan Pettigrew, told the website, adding the killing did not seem like a gang hit. “He needed that violence as a release so he could calm down. He didn’t know any other way.”

Ebel’s parents haven’t returned calls to The Associated Press for comment. But stories from both can be found in an online blog that those close to the family have confirmed the mother wrote, and legislative testimony from the father, who had begged the state to change its solitary confinement rules.

Mangue wrote that her son was an energetic child who accompanied his mother to hand out food and clothes to homeless people in Denver. That energy also was a problem, though. In an earlier online essay, written after visiting her son in prison, Mangue noted that she and Ebel’s father began sending their son to camps for troubled youth when he was 12.

“Some people may blame us for what has happened to Evan,” she wrote then. “I can only say that his dad and I had to make hard decisions when he was younger hoping to avoid where he is now.”

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