No one who knew Kim Dupuis can talk about him without conveying his fiery passion for all that he did.
Ask Rafe Schwimmer, his law partner. Ask friends he met in college. Ask his father, Charles Dupuis, who at 88 said no parent should outlive a son.
They tell different stories, but with the same theme. Everett attorney Kim Earl Dupuis approached life with zeal.
He was 51 when he died of cancer Jan. 4.
“He was a house afire, I’ll tell you,” said Jeff Keane, a Bellevue lawyer who met Dupuis as a freshman at Whitman College in Walla Walla.
“I grew up with three sisters and was always in search of a brother. Sometimes he was my brother, sometimes he was my lawyer,” Keane said. Always a friend, Dupuis climbed Mount Rainier with Keane several times.
“He was intense about trying to do the right thing for his client,” said Schwimmer, Dupuis’ partner since 1999. In the 1980s, they were co-workers in the Snohomish County Public Defenders Office.
“He was very much in the moment, moving forward at full speed all the time,” said Deb Millar, for 20 years Dupuis’ legal secretary and paralegal.
Dupuis lived in Edmonds, near the home of his 14-year-old daughter, Sarah, and his former wife, Shawn Novick. He is also survived by his father, of Wise River, Mont., and his older brother, Bill, of Roseville, Calif. His mother, June, died in 1985.
“Kim was a conscientious son and father,” Charles Dupuis said. “I’m proud of what he accomplished. He graduated from Bellevue High School, from Whitman College, and from law school at Willamette University in Oregon. He was always dedicated to what he was doing.”
In November, Dupuis was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer related to bile ducts and the liver.
He had visited his father in Montana last fall, but didn’t say he was ill. Ten days before he died, he called. “He just said he wasn’t feeling well,” said Charles Dupuis, who stayed with his son in Everett the last days of his life.
Schwimmer spoke of his partner’s dedication at a memorial service at Everett’s Monte Cristo Hotel ballroom.
He recalled Dupuis’ delight when he discovered someone on the opposing side in a case had a false identity. “He had stolen a dead man’s name, had purchased property and married several women at the same time,” Schwimmer said.
“Kim went to great lengths to get this information. He enjoyed the hunt. It showed how intense he could get to advocate for his client. I admired that. A lot of attorneys admired that.”
The law partners shared a poignant kinship. Schwimmer’s mother spent six months at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. Dupuis’ father was a prisoner of war in the Philippines and Japan from 1942 until 1945. “He brought that to our 20 years of friendship,” Schwimmer said.
After law school, Dupuis worked with Keane at the public defender’s office in Clark County before coming to Snohomish County. Here, he worked as a public defender from 1980 until 1984, when he opened a solo practice.
Before partnering with Schwimmer, he was also in firms with local attorneys Bill Sullivan, Thomas Graafstra, James Twisselman and Lori Nightingale.
“He was a Ken Kesey-type character,” Keane said. “He had a large physical presence, with a big voice. He was a positive, active guy, always full of ideas.”
Dr. Bob Carmody met Dupuis in chemistry class their freshman year at Whitman. “I was hoping his coolness could rub off on me,” said Carmody, a family practice doctor in Las Cruces, N.M.
They had summer jobs at a pea plant in Oregon. “We operated the freezer tunnel,” Carmody said. “We’d sit on a stool and watch peas go by.”
One night, they left their post for a snack. There was a “pea jam.” Dupuis and Carmody were in hot water with the boss.
“We quit on the spot,” Carmody said. “We got on his Honda 350 motorcycle and went to Canada. We went to all the lakes and stayed in youth hostels. It was the trip of my life.
“I never lost track of him – never,” Carmody said. Once, when the young doctor had financial problems, “Kim, out of the blue, took 50 $100 bills and overnighted them to my clinic. He was such a good man.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
Kim Dupuis was photographed on Mount Rainier in 1987.
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