Santa Monica police allowed a civilian employee to volunteer in a youth program — where he went on to molest more than 200 children — despite a 1991 background check that revealed he was arrested as a teen for molesting a toddler he baby-sat, according to a report reviewed by The Times.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Eric Uller preyed on the most vulnerable children in the predominately Latino neighborhoods of Santa Monica, often traveling in an unmarked police vehicle or his personal SUV, which was outfitted with police equipment, according to court records. It took decades for Uller to be exposed before he was ultimately arrested and charged in 2018.
This week, the Santa Monica City Council approved a $122.5-million payout to settle hundreds of claims against the city’s top systems analyst, who died by suicide before his first court appearance. The total settlements now top $229 million — the most costly single-perpetrator sexual disbursement for any municipality.
Revelations that police knew of the teenage arrest heightens growing questions about why Santa Monica police missed repeated warnings that Uller was a predator.
Mayor Gleam Davis called the abuse “a sad chapter of the city’s history.” But in announcing the settlement, neither she nor other officials revealed that a 1991 background check uncovered that Uller, then a new police dispatcher, had been accused of sexual abuse as a 14-year-old.
According to the report, conducted by a background investigator for the Santa Monica Police Department, Uller revealed that he had been arrested as a juvenile. He told the investigator he was accused of molesting a 4-year-old boy he was baby-sitting.
Uller told the investigator he saw a counselor, and he was never charged.
The investigator sent an interdepartmental memo detailing his findings to a police sergeant overseeing personnel and training on Nov. 12, 1991 — nine months after Uller formally became a dispatcher.
The investigator also reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Pacific Division, which shows a 1983 juvenile booking record for Uller on suspicion of child molestation. After his arrest, he was released to his parents.
According to documents reviewed by The Times, Uller, then 23, was asked to explain his arrest. He told the investigator that the boy’s mother accused him of molestation because of the way “he touched the child or something.” Uller said it was a long time ago and it was difficult to remember, “as nothing happened.”
Uller’s father, a prominent doctor in Santa Monica, supported his son in an interview with the investigator.
Uller’s stepmother, however, told the investigator she was concerned about what had happened and didn’t know whether Uller had done anything, but she hoped “it was an adolescent phase and he had grown out of it.”
His father, Robert Uller, described the boy in question as the son of a business partner. He told the investigator that after his son was arrested, they hired a psychologist, who said no molestation had occurred and “Eric was fine, however, a little immature.”
The investigator said in the report he did not reach out to the family of the boy, who was 12 at the time.
But after learning from the LAPD crime report that the “incident described was more than a touching molest, as described by Eric,” the investigator interviewed the young dispatcher again.
Uller “seemed very concerned that the charges made against him were so serious, even though not true,” the investigator wrote. He noted that Uller’s references spoke highly of him, and city staff described him as a good worker with extensive computer knowledge.
At the time of the background check, Uller had already worked for two years as a staff assistant at the Police Activities League. He went on to volunteer for the PAL program for at least a decade.
In fact, according to numerous lawsuits filed against the city, Uller was already grooming, sexually abusing and raping dozens of boys in the program.
“We need a new state law to make government officials more culpable when they repeatedly overlook reports of child sexual abuse,” said attorney Brian Claypool, who represented more than 80 victims in the lawsuits. “These are mandated reporters, and law as it stands isn’t enough.”
Santa Monica officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the revelation of the background report, which was the first of many warnings that were repeatedly ignored before Uller was arrested.
A Santa Monica police sergeant became suspicious of Uller’s behavior with a boy between 1991 and 1993 and launched an investigation, according to a 2018 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department report reviewed by The Times.
Michelle Cardiel, a PAL employee from 1990 to 1998, told a sheriff’s detective that “the child went everywhere with Eric, and it seemed odd.”
Cardiel told sheriff’s investigators that around 1995, a boy told her that Uller had offered to help “clean his penis because his father is a doctor.” Cardiel reported the incident to Santa Monica police Officer Jay Trisler, who was then assigned to the PAL program, and Trisler said he would investigate. She also told her PAL boss, Patty Loggins, who told Cardiel that she would be written up if she kept spreading workplace gossip, according to the sheriff’s report.
The following day, Cardiel said, Uller approached her and said the interaction he’d had with the boy had been inappropriate and begged her not to mention it again.
Neither Trisler nor Loggins returned messages for comment.
In an interview with The Times, Cardiel recalled two officers who interviewed the boy at the time saying “there had been a misunderstanding” and Uller never touched the child.
Attorney Brian Claypool represented more than 80 victims in a sex abuse settlement with Santa Monica.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
In a sworn declaration obtained by The Times, a female detective with the sheriff’s juvenile unit, whose identity is being withheld from this report, said she became suspicious of Uller, noting he ”was becoming too close, both physically and emotionally, with the boys that I saw him with.”
“I thought that Eric’s behavior and involvement around the boys was not appropriate, and so I reported my concerns to my sergeant and my lieutenant,” the detective said, noting that she was told by her superiors it was not her business.
She said she also discovered that Uller had had boys over at his house and had taken them on weekend trips. When she told him to stop this behavior, he ignored her, she said in the declaration.
According to the sheriff’s report from 2018, several former Santa Monica employees told detectives they reported Uller’s misconduct.
Retired Santa Monica police Lt. Greg Slaughter, who headed the department’s communications center where Uller was the lead systems analyst, said that one morning in the early 2000s, a supervisor turned on a computer for work and child pornography popped up on the screen. Slaughter said he immediately ordered an investigation, which led to Uller, but he was never interviewed regarding the allegations.
Slaughter told a sheriff’s investigator that Uller reported directly to the chief of police, James Butts. “The rank structure was overlooked for Eric’s behalf,” Slaughter said in the sheriff’s report.
Slaughter also said he witnessed Uller driving young boys “all over town” and reported it to his bosses. He said that after learning that Uller “was given a take-home, fully equipped unmarked police vehicle,” he told the department’s chief of staff that such use was improper.
Butts, who led the Santa Monica Police Department from 1991 to 2006 and is now mayor of Inglewood, said Tuesday in an email to The Times that he “was never made aware of any allegations against Uller or anyone in the program.”
After starting as a 911 dispatcher, Uller rose to become the principal systems analyst for the city’s information technology department, and in 2009 he was awarded the Santa Monica Rotary Club’s public service award. He spent most of his career overhauling the 911 system, overseeing the city’s surveillance cameras, rebuilding the arrest and traffic violation databases and constructing a crime-mapping system.
Some of Uller’s victims recalled he would even turn on the police lights and sirens as he drove them home, further enforcing the idea that he was a cop working under the color of authority, documents summarizing the victims’ accounts reveal.
Uller bribed some with $20 bills, trips to Lakers games or McDonald’s, and video games, according to witness statements. Others he threatened, particularly those who’d had scrapes with the law or whose families’ immigration status made them vulnerable.
“I couldn’t say nothing because my family would go to jail,” said John AM Doe, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs who said he was abused by Uller for two years. “It was as if he could get away with whatever he wanted.”
Another victim said Uller began abusing him as a teenager after he was arrested by Santa Monica police. As the young man struggled with other run-ins with the law, he was forced to submit to sex acts with Uller, according to his court claim records.
“The unspoken threat is if I didn’t go along with Eric, I would go to jail,” the man said in a recent court declaration.
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