Pat O’Sullivan

Pat was born and raised in Culver City and graduated from Culver High in 1962. He played football and was on the wrestling team.

He attended Santa Monica College in 1962-1965 majoring in Business, Biology and then Police Science (which was supposed to be an easy class). But that is when he got hooked on law enforcement.

In 1965 Pat joined the Naval Reserves. When he returned from the Naval Reserve Academy he started dating Laurie who lived down the street. From1966-68 he attended school at Long Beach State where he met Jon Schorle. Jon invited him to come to Newport Beach to test as a police officer. His oral board consisted of McDaniel, Simon and Schorle.

Pat was hired and sent to the LA Police Academy. At that time you spent a month at the academy and a month in the field. During his training, he saw the opposite ends of law enforcement: his training officer, Mullins, caught a prowler and got a cop-out from the prowler by being nice. Then he saw Todd Wilkinson almost choke a guy to death trying to get him to cough up a joint that he had swallowed.

Pat worked four years in patrol and during that time he spent a year as the department’s first CLO officer. That was when the court was in Costa Mesa. Then he went to detectives and worked under Don Oyaas. Don had started a team concept in detectives, so Pat worked all types of investigations. He worked with Simon, Epstein, Hytella and Ken Smith. He then went to burglary detectives where he spent four years. Pat was promoted as sergeant in 1978 and went back into patrol where he spent another four years.

After a disagreement with his supervisor, he ended up in records for three years where he worked with Kelly Gonis, Pat Brown, Gabby and Fran. He then went back to Juvenile Detective supervisor, supervising LaVonne Campbell. He picked up the nickname, “Father O’Sullivan” because of his ability to get sex offenders to confess to their crimes.

He then spent his last three years in robbery homicide, retiring in 1998. He took one month off and proceeded to be hired by the DA’s office, working the next eleven years.

Some of Pat’s most fond memories are remembering refereeing arguments between Jay Winn, Rick Schulz, Ed Walsh and Mike Morrison. One of his most memorable cases was the conviction of Corona del Mar’s football coach, Schuster, who had molested his own daughter.

A memory of Pat’s was that in 1997 he purchased a red 300 ZX and became the envy of all the guys.

Pat and Laurie have two children, Kelly and Kevin, and three grandchildren. He is retired now and playing lots of golf.

May 1, 2009