FILE - This undated file photo released by the Colorado Department of Corrections shows paroled inmate Evan Spencer Ebel, alleged gunman in the shooting death of Colorado corrections chief Tom Clements. Investigators are examining Ebel's alleged role in the killing, trying to determine if it was his plan or carried out at the direction of a prison gang. (AP Photo/Colorado Department of Corrections, File)

This undated image provided by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation shows Stevie Marie Vigil, 22, of Commerce City who was arrested Wednesday March 27, 2013 accused of illegally transferring the gun authorities say was used to kill Colorado's prisons chief. Investigators believe Vigil, legally bought the firearm from a licensed dealer in the Denver suburb of Englewood and transferred it to Evan Ebel, who was a felon who couldn't legally possess a firearm, the CBI said. (AP Photo/Colorado Bureau of Investigation)

DENVER (AP) — 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.

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."

On Jan. 31, 2004, Ebel's younger sister died in a traffic accident, devastating him.

"He was the protective big brother and in this case, was unable to protect her," Mangue wrote. "His life deteriorated after that and he just became numb and lost his direction altogether, between using drugs and committing crimes."

Court records show that Ebel pleaded guilty a few months after his sister's death — in July 2004 — to holding a semi-automatic pistol to an acquaintance's head and stealing his wallet while they watched a Denver Broncos game on television. He was first sent to a halfway house. But after being linked to two other armed robberies, he went to state prison.

Corrections officials won't release detailed information about Ebel's prison time, saying the case remains under investigation. But court records show that in 2006, he punched a prison guard in the nose and was convicted of assaulting a corrections official. He was sent to solitary confinement, where he did "Navy Seal type exercises" and read obsessively — including "War and Peace" several times over, Mangue wrote. Disgusted by prison chow, Ebel became a vegetarian.

Jack Ebel testified before Colorado's Legislature about how solitary confinement changed his son.

"He'll rant a little bit," the elder Ebel told legislators. "He'll stammer. He'll be frustrated that he can't find the words. And I let him get it out, and eventually, because I'm his father, he will talk to me. And I'm convinced, if any of the rest of you were to go talk to him, he wouldn't be able to talk to you."

Jack Ebel also mentioned his son's suffering to Gov. John Hickenlooper, whom he first met when both men worked at an oil and gas firm 30 years ago. They'd stayed in touch even as Hickenlooper launched a career in politics and won the governor's office in 2010.

As he assembled his cabinet, Hickenlooper wooed a deeply religious, data-driven Missouri corrections official to run Colorado's state prisons system. During Hickenlooper's interview withTom Clements, the Missouri official mentioned his concerns about solitary confinement.

Since Clements came to Colorado in 2011, the number of inmates in solitary confinement has nearly been halved.

"The irony is incredible," Hickenlooper said. "One of the things Tom fought for, we have too many people in solitary confinement with mental disorders, like Evan Ebel."

In January, Ebel was released on mandatory parole — meaning that even though he'd completed his sentence, he still had to abide by a parole agreement or be thrown back in prison. Corrections spokeswoman Alison Morgan said she couldn't discuss the terms of Ebel's release but that every parolee has to comply with certain personalized requirements, like attending anger management or substance abuse counseling. She said the state also offers parolees help with housing and job placement.

Little is known about Ebel's final two months. However investigators have offered a hint of how he might have gotten the gun used in Texas, even though he was a convicted felon who couldn't legally have one. Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents on Wednesday arrested a suburban Denver woman suspected of legally purchasing a gun and then transferring it to Ebel. Records related to the arrest of Stevie Marie Vigil, 22, were sealed.

It's unclear whether he knew of Clements' reformist goals or just viewed him like many other inmates, as "The Man," as they called whoever ran the prisons agency. It's also unclear if he remained a member of the 211s white supremacist gang that law enforcement officials say he had joined in prison.

On Sunday, March 17, police found the body of Nathan Leon, a father of three who worked as a Domino's deliveryman and had vanished after answering an order that day. Days later, Clements answered the doorbell at his house and was shot in the chest.

Authorities asked people to look out for a dark, late-model car that had been spotted idling outside Clements' house shortly before the shooting. Two days later, a sheriff's deputy in an empty stretch of North Texas pulled Ebel over. Ebel shot and wounded him, and sped off.

Authorities gave chase. Ebel peppered them with gunfire before crashing his 1991 Cadillac into an 18-wheeler hauling gravel near the town of Decatur.

Three deputies surrounded him, but he left his wrecked vehicle and opened fire. The deputies shot back. Ebel was hit in the head and died at a Fort Worth hospital. He had bomb-making equipment, instructions and other plans in his car, but it's not clear where he was going.

One thing was clear, said Decatur Police Chief Rex Hoskins: "He wasn't planning on being taken alive."

___

Thomas Peipert, Colleen Slevin and Catherine Tsai in Denver and Angela K. Brown in Decatur, Texas contributed to this report.

NASA

An unusually large storm responsible for this past week’s record late March snow has moved over to the North Atlantic just in time for spring break.

The enormous storm, which stretches coast-to-coast from Newfoundland to Portugal, is not only overwhelming in size but very intense. Its central pressure is 953 millibars, carrying the force of a Category 3 hurricane.

With some of the storm’s waves measuring as high as 30 to 40 feet, it has grown into a monster extending as far as the Caribbean since its original humble beginnings.

In the past two days, the storm has grown powerful enough to draw record low temperatures in the Southeast United States, including Florida and the Florida Keys.

From where it began in the Midwest to where it blanketed the Mid-Atlantic with snow, the massive storm is now in a pocket of Greenland and Eastern Canada cold air and the mild Gulf Stream air. This disparity in temperature has enhanced the storm’s strength.

As it moves towards Western Europe, the strength of the storm has already began to weaken slightly. Over the next few days, it will break up into several systems that will travel into Europe. These particular storms are not expected to be unusually strong, as they approach Portugal by next Wednesday.

North Korea's young leader Kim Jong Un today ordered his missile batteries to prepare to launch against U.S. and South Korea targets, the latest act of belligerence that has left the United States and the world on edge in recent weeks.

But despite Kim's menacing posture, the U.S. military recently wargamed a different scenario: how many American troops would be needed to go in and secure North Korea's nuclear arsenal if Kim's regime collapsed.

That was the objective this February when the U.S. military played out its Winter Wargame, that the autocratic rule of Kim Jong Un unraveled either from civil unrest or a challenge to his power and his arsenal of nukes was up for grabs. It's a scenario that some believe is more likely than a North Korea attack on the south.

"North Korea has relied on these time honored, very effective tools that dictators have wielded all over the world, and what we know about these tools is that they work until they don't," said Jennifer Lind, a Dartmouth professor who has studied potential missions to North Korea.

Recent years have seen the sudden collapse of dictatorial regimes in Libya and Egypt, and Syria is now in flames with control of its chemical weapons in doubt.

"A regime collapse is always on the table, and we are in an uncertain period of leadership transition," said Rodger Baker, a geopolitical analyst from Stratfor Global Intelligence.

In a war game focusing on the fictitious country "North Brownland," military experts from the Army's forward-looking research arm, the Concept Development and Learning Directorate, assessed how many U.S. troops it would take to go into a North Korea-like place to secure the weapons after a crisis erupted, and how quickly those weapons could be secured.

According to Maj. Gen. Bill Hix, who oversaw the war game, American troops would have to enter the country by air and sea, locate nuclear material in enormous storehouses and unknown underground bunkers, and figure out how to wrest control of nuclear materials and stop reactors. The challenges, Hix said, are significant.

"We looked at this issue of countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, specificallynuclear weapons, and fissile material, and the data and the scientists associated with that kind of enterprise," Hix said.

Hix declined to discuss the game's conclusions, but he cited studies that determined that nearly 100,000 troops would be needed to storm the country and secure nuclear material, and that the armed forces are still in need of nuclear experts who could help with such a mission.

"There are obviously many people in the U.S. government or the U.S. who are experts in nuclear reactors or whatever, but not paid to work in a hostile environment where someone is trying to kill you while you are trying to render safe a reactor or fissile material," the general said.

Defense News, which first reported on the wargame, said it took U.S. troops 56 days to get into the country and secure the weapons.

Lind estimated that the mission would need up to 200,000 additional troops to carry out other aspects of stabilizing the country, including efforts to feed citizens, and locating and disarming conventional weapons and artillery.

Those levels would exceed the peak number of troops in Iraq, which was 165,000, and the peak for Afghanistan, which was 101,000.

"Can we get the job done? I think the answer is yes," Hix said. "Can we do it at the speed that may be required right now? I think we're challenged to do that."

Experts said the U.S. began taking seriously the possibility of a regime collapse in 2008 when the former leader, Kim Jong-il, had a stroke. The concern grew when Kim Jong-il died in 2011 and son Kim Jong Un, who is believed to be 30, took over.

Lind said that though Kim's recent statements have been more frequent and more antagonistic than usual, it would make little sense for North Korea to launch a strike now.

"I don't believe war is coming because North Korea has no rational reason for starting a war which would lead them to no longer exist," Lind said.

"I think the number one mission for the U.S. is to defend South Korea against a North Korea invasion, (and) over time that's gotten less and less plausible," she said. "Second is these collapse scenarios."

"When we think about collapse, we worry about all of that [nuclear material] being flung to the winds and accessed on a global black market," Lind said. "Then of course the nightmare scenario is a terrorist group gets hold of fissile material, or a weapon, or one of the scientists that shows them how to make a nuclear weapon."

Gen. Hix noted that the military is constantly preparing for any crises or scenario it may face in the future, and both he and the other experts agreed that a North Korean collapse is not visibly imminent.

"If we look at various factors, I wouldn't say there's any particular indicator that we should be worried right now, but this could change in a matter of days. We could see a collapse and then be speculating for decades," Lind said.

Baker said that though the probability of a collapse was higher than that of North Korea attacking another country, he expected Kim to continue leading the country, with its economy limping along, in the near future. He said he ultimately expects Kim to begin to open North Korea to the rest of the world.