VALLEJO – In 2017, the Vallejo Police Department hired a police officer after three previous law enforcement agencies disqualified him who has since been involved in a string of high profile scandals, according to a background investigator’s report and polygraph examination obtained by the Vallejo Sun.

Before Vallejo hired Corporal Colin Eaton, a background investigator found that he should be disqualified because of integrity and judgment issues. He owed tens of thousands of dollars in back child support and participated in a sham marriage to profit through his military service, according to the investigator’s report.

“At this time due to the applicant's prior integrity issues with defrauding the government for financial gain and neglecting his financial responsibilities for child support for over 13 years, I do not recommend this applicant for the position of Police Officer Recruit for the Vallejo Police Department,” private investigator Andrea Moreland wrote in a background report ahead of his hiring.

Eaton admitted during a polygraph examination that he had participated in the sham marriage and owed $25,000 in back child support, according to a copy of the report obtained by the Sun. Eaton did not respond to a request for comment.

Eaton’s application materials corroborate accounts by two recruiters who worked for the department between 2019 and 2022 who said Vallejo police had no standards for new recruits and hired officers who couldn’t find jobs at other agencies or were in trouble at their previous jobs. 

In Vallejo, Eaton has been involved in several high-profile use of force incidents and has been sued three times. Eaton was one of six officers who shot Willie McCoy in 2019, was sued for pulling over McCoy’s niece and Tasing her two months later, was disciplined for stepping on a man’s head during a search in 2020 and was seen in a viral video punching a driver after a pursuit in 2023. He is one of five current and four former Vallejo officers whom the American Civil Liberties Union has sought to de-certify in a complaint to the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST. 

Eaton’s application materials were provided to the Sun by Vallejo civil rights attorney Melissa Nold, who said she received them from an unknown source. The Sun is publishing the polygraph report but not the other materials because of extensive unrelated personal information contained in the documents.

Nold is suing the city of Vallejo over the 2019 traffic stop when Eaton and another officer involved in the McCoy shooting held McCoy’s niece at gunpoint, dragged her out of her car and Tased her. Nold has gathered extensive evidence about the Vallejo Police Department through the case, but said she did not receive Eaton’s hiring records through the lawsuit.

John Whitney, a former Vallejo police captain turned whistleblower, testified in a deposition in the lawsuit that he was aware of the issues with Eaton and recommended his disqualification, but the department hired him anyway.

Eaton’s history before Vallejo police

The report into Eaton’s background said he was born in 1986 on a U.S. Air Force base in Tokyo and moved with his parents to California when he was three years old. He later moved with his mother to Pennsylvania, Texas and Illinois, where he graduated high school. 

After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, and then discovered his girlfriend was pregnant. He married her in 2006 under pressure from his family, but lived with her and his newborn son for only two weeks before he decided to leave, according to the investigator’s report. He’s had no relationship with his son since, according to the report.

Eaton’s wages were garnished to support his son while he was in the Marines. After he left the military, he agreed to pay his ex-wife $400 a month for child support, but made only a handful of payments before stopping. A decade later, he paid $25,000 in back child support when he applied to be a police officer, according to the investigator’s report.

While in the Marines, Eaton was an aviation ground support mechanic and was later assigned to a top secret helicopter squadron that was responsible for evacuating the White House in case of an emergency. He completed his active duty assignment in 2009 and re-enlisted in the military as an active reserve. When he received an active duty assignment in New York, he found an apartment off base, but then discovered that because he wasn’t married, he wasn’t eligible for a housing stipend. 

To get money for housing, Eaton married a friend he had no relationship with, according to his background investigation. He reached out to the woman and asked her to marry him and drove from New York to Virginia to marry her at a courthouse there. He drove back to New York the same day and applied for housing funds, the report states. Eaton and the woman “never lived together nor did they have a romantic relationship,” the report states. “The applicant acknowledged his actions as fraudulent and regrets the decision he made,” the investigator wrote.

The woman told the investigator that she “realized what she did was wrong and told [Eaton] she was going to file for divorce,” which they did in 2011, according to the report.

Eaton met his third wife the following year and married her just before he completed his active reserve duty. They moved from New York to California to live with Eaton’s mother, but the woman moved back to New York after only two weeks. The couple remained married at the time of Eaton’s application to Vallejo five years later, but didn’t stay in touch and the investigator was unable to reach her. 

“Based on the nature of the applicant’s first two marriages, there is a concern about the nature of separation from his current wife and the reasoning why neither has filed for divorce,” the investigator wrote. “It is unclear if the applicant made another ‘business arrangement’ with his current spouse and that’s the reason neither has filed for divorce.”

When Eaton applied with the Vallejo Police Department in 2017, he had also submitted an application to more than 20 other law enforcement agencies. According to his polygraph examination, three disqualified him based on his background information: the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, San Jose Police Department and Fairfield Police Department. The San Pablo Police Department expressed concerns with his unpaid child support and did not move forward, according to his background report. He withdrew his application from several other agencies.

In Vallejo, the background investigator also recommended against his hiring. Former Capt. John Whitney testified in a deposition that he did not think Eaton should be hired based on the background investigation.

“I felt that it was dishonest defrauding the military of funds for legitimately married couples when he simply got married and allowed his – I don’t know if you would even call her his spouse – to collect this money after he gets deployed,” Whitney said.

But Whitney testified that then-police Chief Andrew Bidou decided to move forward anyway because Eaton and Bidou were both former Marines.

Early allegations of misconduct

Early in Eaton’s tenure, two incidents alarmed a superior but weren’t properly investigated, according to Whitney. In one incident, Eaton approached a man who was sitting in his car watching people go to and from an ATM. Eaton saw him reach for something, so he dragged the man out of his car. But the man had actually been reaching for his prosthetic leg to put on and walk to the ATM.

Whitney said that Lt. Herman Robinson alerted him to the incident. Robinson “was very angry on how this gentleman was treated. The gentleman was Black, and obviously Lt. Robinson is as well,” Whitney testified. “He didn't believe the gentleman was treated fairly, and that just a little discussion could have mitigated that.”

Whitney described another incident when a woman pulled into a handicap parking spot at a 7-Eleven without a placard. When she got out of her car, Eaton demanded her ID. She refused and told Eaton, “Write my car a ticket." Eaton then took her into custody and Robinson went out to the scene to try to figure out what was going on. 

“It showed a pattern,” Whitney testified. “The woman was an older Black female. And they were very close in time. And it again caused Lt. Robinson concern on what Officer Eaton was doing and how he was communicating with people.”

On Feb. 9, 2019, six Vallejo police officers fired 55 bullets into Willie McCoy’s silver Mercedes while he was unresponsive in a Taco Bell drive thru. Eaton fired 13 of those rounds, more than any of the other officers. Shortly after the shooting, another of the officers, Ryan McMahon, was placed on leave while the department investigated alterations to his gun. When he turned in his badge, an investigator discovered it had two bent tips representing his two shootings as a Vallejo police officer, according to Whitney.

About two months later, Eaton was one of two officers who arrested McCoy’s niece Deyana Jenkins. A lawsuit alleged that Eaton and Officer Jordan Patzer – another of the officers who killed McCoy – held Jenkins at gunpoint, dragged her out of the car, threw her on the ground and Tased her. A bystander recorded the events.

Jenkins was arrested and taken to jail, but the Solano County District Attorney’s Office didn’t charge her with a crime. 

Whitney was alarmed by the badge-bending allegations and video of Jenkins’ arrest and tried to address it with Bidou and other city officials. But the department did not investigate badge bending at the time and fired Whitney instead. The following year, Whitney went public with the scandal, sued the department, and later settled his lawsuit for $900,000.

New department leadership

Amid growing criticism of the McCoy shooting and other issues in the department, Bidou retired in 2019. The city hired Shawny Williams, the city’s first Black police chief who had been with the San Jose Police Department for 26 years. Williams also brought over two veteran officers from San Jose as recruiters to try and improve the department’s hiring practices. One of the recruiters, Ron Tabron, testified that they encountered resistance in setting new standards for recruits.

Records previously obtained by the Vallejo Sun showed that Vallejo police had no clear hiring standards when Williams was hired. Tabron testified that the sergeant and lieutenant chose to advance candidates they “liked,” who often couldn’t get hired elsewhere.

“My understanding with a lot of the people who was hired in Vallejo fit into two different categories,” Tabron testified. “It's because they couldn't get hired in other agencies, or it's because they were in trouble at a prior agency, and they came to Vallejo.”

The recruiters found that the officers in charge of hiring at the time, then-Lt. Robert Knight and Sgt. Jared Jaksch, created roadblocks that prevented them from efficiently recruiting applicants.

“We were the new recruiters and the chief was going in the direction of ‘guardians’ and community policing,” Tabron testified, “but they were still looking for officers who were more warrior-type mentality because they were saying that Vallejo was a violent city and we need people that's going to be able to go out there and, in their own words, were to be ‘warriors and cowboys’ because ‘We're the last city that's allowed to do police work,’ according to them.”

Eaton was suspended for 80 hours for an arrest on April 19, 2020. He had responded to a call of a man exposing himself. As officers arrived, the man had his pants halfway down.

As he approached the man, Eaton pulled out his baton and said, “Get down right now, I will fuck you up. Sit down, I will fuck you up.”

Another officer told investigators that she ordered the man to sit down several times and pushed him over to handcuff him. The other officer told investigators that the man stiffened his limbs to prevent from being handcuffed. Eaton hit the man once with a baton.

According to the officers, the suspect complied, but Eaton put his foot on the man’s head “to prevent him from moving about and resisting further.”

An initial internal investigation conducted by then-Sgt. Sanjay Ramrakha found that Eaton violated the department’s policies on discourteous and disrespectful treatment as well as profane language. Later, then-Deputy Chief Michael Kihmm amended that determination and found that Eaton had violated the use of force policy when he put his boot on the man’s head.

In October 2023, a video of Eaton punching a driver after a crash went viral on TikTok. Eaton had pursued the driver after a security guard at a nearby Kohl’s store pointed out the car as involved in shoplifting. The driver crashed a short time later. Eaton pulled the woman from the car, slammed her against a cement truck and punched her.

The driver, later identified as 19-year-old Maiya Green, pleaded no contest to grand theft and evading police. Green filed a lawsuit accusing Eaton of excessive force and assault, among other allegations, which was settled for $11,000 earlier this year.

Days after the video of the incident went viral, state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a new stipulated judgment for Vallejo police reform – which has since been withdrawn – and acknowledged he had seen the video. Bonta called it “disturbing” and said it would be investigated. 

The results of any investigation into Eaton’s 2023 use-of-force incident have not been made public, but the Vallejo police department gave him a medal of merit a few months later. He was promoted to corporal and joined the board of the Vallejo Police Officers Association earlier this year.

But while the department has rewarded Eaton, the ACLU has sought to remove him from the force. The civil rights organization submitted a complaint to POST, the state agency that certifies police officers, which called for Eaton to be de-certified as a law enforcement officer under SB 2, a 2021 state law which allows the state to revoke eligibility for officers involved in misconduct.

“The alleged conduct described above is a clear public safety concern,” the ACLU’s complaint states. “If the many allegations against Eaton are true, Eaton has shown a repeated pattern of using physical abuse, leading to community members’ great physical and emotional harm, trauma, and death. Unfortunately, Eaton can continue harming members of the public in his role as a police officer.”