Seattle, Wash. — King County prosecutors say for two long years, two men preyed on and terrorized underage girls in the Seattle-area.
37-year-old Scott Barry Uchida and 34-year-old Thomas Edward Lee Anderson are both charged with multiple counts of child rape and promoting the commercial sexual abuse of a minor.
Detectives say it wasn’t until the first victim became suicidal that anyone knew what was going on in a basement apartment in the U-District for 883 days.
The first victim
In January of 2018, a Kirkland police officer was called to one of the area schools after a student reported to a youth advocate she was thinking of taking her own life.
What she told the officer was heartbreaking and horrific.
According to the probable cause statement, in the summer of 2015, the girl identified as H.G. met Uchida and Anderson on the social media site meetme.com when she was only 12 years old. She said the two men contacted her through the app and offered to pick her up so they could smoke marijuana and drink alcohol.
H.G. told investigators they drove her to a basement studio apartment near 12th Avenue NE and NE 50th Street, where they got high and drunk.
She said that’s when both Uchida and Anderson violently raped her for three days, threatening violence if she left.
H.G. reported Uchida put her phone in airplane mode, searched her contacts for family members and said he would kill her family if she did not recruit other girls to the apartment.
She described being brought into the apartment’s bathroom, shown 55-gallon drums and told they used those barrels to dissolve bodies and they could make her disappear.
The second victim
The first victim recruited a 14-year-old girl, identified as S.S., to come to the apartment in August of 2015, according to court documents.
That girl said she was beaten and raped by Uchida, then raped again by both Uchida and Anderson.
S.S. said they took naked photos of her for potential clients and the same night recruited two other men who paid to have sex with the juveniles and raped both girls.
She told detectives Uchida offered them up for $1,000 if the clients used a condom or $2,000 without one.
S.S. said she filed a police report with the Bellevue Police Department, which was then forwarded to Seattle police.
The third victim
The first victim identified the third girl she was forced to recruit into prostitution who was just 15 years old, identified as I.H.
Like the others, she said she was raped by the two men, threatened and forced into prostitution.
I.H. said the men even videotaped the assault.
I.H. secretly took a photo of the mail sitting in the apartment, telling detectives she did that so she could later identify them.
An arrest and charges
Prosecutors describe the extreme fear and terror all three victims felt.
Court documents state, “The victims were made to believe that they had become a part of the defendants’ street gang because of the rapes and therefore had become the gang’s chattel. The defendants systematically instilled fear in each of these victims by using social media and the girls’ phones to learn about their personal lives. They threatened to kill the victims’ parents and siblings and burn down their homes.”
Thomas Edward Lee Anderson is currently in King County Jail.
Police are still trying to track down Scott Barry Uchida.
If you have any information that could help detectives find him, call Corporal Clayton Slominski of the Kirkland Police Department at (425) 587-3510.
The case is scheduled for an arraignment on Mar. 25.
Cox Media Group
