Sex offender shoots self after killing girl

Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2006 7:15 am

Posted on Sun, Jul. 16, 2006

PORT ST. LUCIE
Sex offender shoots self after killing girl

PORT ST. LUCIE - (AP) -- A registered sex offender fatally shot a 17-year-old girl he had been harassing, then killed himself after an hourlong standoff with police Saturday, authorities said.

Police had been investigating 42-year-old Scott David Uslan's relationship with Brittany Carleo for several months, but did not have cause to arrest him until Wednesday after he started making harassing phone calls to the teen, police spokesman Rob Vega said.

Uslan posted bond and was released from jail Thursday. He entered the cafe where Carleo worked with a gun around 9:15 a.m. Saturday, police said. ''Unfortunately, this madman was not kept behind bars where apparently he should have been kept, and unfortunately we have a young girl who is now dead,'' Vega said.

Two other cafe employees escaped out the back.

Uslan had been obsessed with Carleo since she dated his son two years ago, and the teen eventually sought a restraining order against him, family members said.

Uslan was registered as a sexual offender in Florida because of a previous conviction of providing obscene material to a minor.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/15048834.htm?source=rss&channel=miamiherald_state

Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 4:59 pm

Mourners say farewell to troubled young life
By Allyson Bird

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Monday, July 24, 2006

PORT ST. LUCIE â€” Brittany Carleo was buried last week with a floppy stuffed pig and a cellphone.

Her friends remembered the 17-year-old for late-night fast food trips and the one webbed toe that she proudly showed them.

They talked about her silly questions â€” Could people get paid for volunteering? â€” and her giving her 2006 royal blue Ford Focus her own nickname, Burt.

They remembered her as a child, but the blue-eyed girl bore a secret that left her bouncing from home to home, calling suicide hotlines and worrying about her reputation and her safety.

She wanted to get away from Scott Uslan, a 42-year-old sex offender and her ex-boyfriend's father, who had been sexually assaulting her for more than a year, police reports say.

He shot her in the head with a.357 Magnum on July 15 in the kitchen of the Tropical Smoothie CafÃ© where she worked. Then he turned the gun on himself.

The man she so desperately wanted to escape became forever linked to her in death.

A persuasive personality

Carleo started dating Chris Uslan two years ago, while they were at Port St. Lucie High School. From the time the two were together, Uslan's father was around, said younger sister Brianna Carleo.

"We did a lot of fun things with Scott," said the 14-year-old sister, sitting on her bed under a photo shrine to Brittany.

Brianna remembered one trip to Busch Gardens that the girls took with Uslan and his son. The dad talked the admission price down from about $60 to $10 for each of them, she said.

"He knew how to talk anybody out of anything," she said.

The dad told good stories, she said, some of which painted a threatening picture. She remembered a pitchfork tattoo on his neck and its accompanying tale that he joined a major national gang while in prison.

He gave Brittany figurines of pigs, her favorite animal, and a large portion of the clothes in her closet.

And he posed as their stepfather, signing for Brianna Carleo's tongue ring and the thick tribal tattoo on her sister's lower back. He also accompanied Brittany Carleo when she got his son's name tattooed on her ankle.

Brittany Carleo and Scott Uslan spent a lot of time alone, the younger sister said, and her sister and Chris Uslan sometimes argued about it. When Brianna Carleo asked what was going on, her sister told her not to worry, that it was none of her business.

In police reports, Brittany Carleo said the two had hundreds of sexual encounters, usually after she had been drinking and taking Xanax.

Brittany Carleo and Chris Uslan broke up after the boy was sent to a juvenile detention center in Polk County. He later moved to Colorado, where his mother lives. Neither he nor his mother could be reached for this story.

Diary reveals another secret

After his son left town, Scott Uslan didn't stop coming around the Carleos.

Brittany Carleo moved in with her aunt and uncle in part, the younger sister said, to get away from memories of Scott Uslan.

Barbara Martin said that when her niece lived with them for less than a week in December, Uslan came by the house every day and twice came to the door asking for the girl.

"I told her she couldn't stay if she couldn't cut it off," said her aunt, who has three children of her own. Brittany Carleo apologized as she packed her things to move back in with her father.

Her father, Frank Carleo, let Uslan into his house on Balmoral Court. Uslan had an excuse for everything, Frank Carleo said, even when he was accused of showing off naked pictures of Brittany Carleo. Uslan told the family some boys took the pictures when she was high on Xanax at a party. He was just helping her get rid of them.

The Carleos bought his story.

Both Frank Carleo and Pam Boyle, Brittany's mother and his ex-wife, have been arrested on domestic violence and substance abuse charges, state records show. Boyle was in jail on a trespassing charge the day her daughter was killed. She stayed with her ex-husband during the wake and funeral.

Brittany Carleo wrote in a journal that one of her mother's old boyfriends inappropriately touched her. The man sat among family on the plush green funeral parlor couches at her wake Wednesday afternoon. When the Martins arrived, they barred him from viewing her.

"She wrote some things in her diary on June 19, and we can't go against it," Barbara Martin told the man. He said nothing in reply.

One brother left home

Steven Carleo, the Carleo girls' 25-year-old brother, left home when he was a teenager. He is the oldest of the Carleos' four children, and he wanted more structure in his family life. He moved in with his grandparents as soon as his family came to Port St. Lucie from Stony Brook, N.Y.

"Unfortunately, (the girls) weren't old enough to do that," he said.

He now lives in Miami, where he works as a biomedical engineer. He and his wife are expecting their first child, a boy, in September.

His younger sister, on the other hand, dropped out of high school.

In recent memory, whenever he called her, he instead got Scott Uslan.

"You had to pass through him to talk to her," he said.

In the spring, after Scott Uslan went to jail, Brittany Carleo asked the Martins if she could move back into their Montauk Street home. They welcomed her with new curtains and a rug for her room, and she told Barbara Martin everything Uslan had done to her.

Their first time together was at a beach party, the niece said. She drank and took Xanax and knew in the morning that Uslan had sexually assaulted her.

The girl told her aunt that she kept quiet because he threatened to tell people she was dirty. When she came clean with Aunt Barbs, the girl worried he'd hurt both of them.

In one journal entry in a self-help book, she wrote: Why didn't I just get out of it all. There was a few times I was just going 2 end my life.

It had been no secret to the Carleos that Uslan was a sex offender.

"He was showing porn to kids, but they weren't even that young," said the younger sister, who wears a diamond stud in her nose. Two of Uslan's victims in 2000 were her age at the time of his crime.

One of them, now 21, echoes her descriptions of Uslan as a cool older friend.

When the woman knew him, Scott Uslan lived adjacent to the basketball courts in an apartment complex on Hillmoor Drive. He was always outside where the children played, she said.

"You couldn't believe how nice he was," she said. "He would offer to take you to the Rapids."

She thought he was just a friendly neighbor until the day he asked her to come look at something on his computer. It was a picture of a naked woman.

He was sentenced to a year in prison on two counts of transmitting obscene material to a minor.

The woman saw him a few times after he was released. She said he'd come into the grocery store where she worked as a teenager, staring and pointing at her as she stood behind her register.

One of the homeboys

David Uslan, Scott Uslan's 19-year-old son and brother to Brittany Carleo's ex-boyfriend, said he got a call from his grandmother hours before the murder-suicide.

His father left an apologetic goodbye letter at the house where they lived together. When David Uslan stopped at the Circle K near the crime scene later that morning, he saw police cars and immediately knew.

"I put two and two together. Jesus Christ, I didn't really think he'd go to such an extreme," David Uslan said.

He described his dad as "a big kid."

"All my friends like him," he said. "He was like another homeboy."

In his younger days, Scott Uslan played baseball and football and ran track. But recently, he spent most of his days at home, sleeping. He didn't have a job.

His father, Murray Uslan, said he found 42 letters to his son from Brittany Carleo after their deaths. Each, he said, thanked him for helping her get off drugs and alcohol.

Untainted memories

No one spoke of the circumstances of Brittany Carleo's death at her wake and funeral.

Her casket was closed after the immediate family's viewing. Visitors were not allowed to see what happened to her face.

Brittany Carleos' older brother stopped everyone as they began to rise at the end of the funeral Thursday at Morningside Church. He had spoken with his sister two weeks earlier, about two months after she had made a religious commitment.

"She wanted everybody to find God and fix themselves up," he said to his family, standing before two dozen floral arrangements given in his sister's memory.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/local_news/epaper/2006/07/24/m1a_slcarleo_0724.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=17