SEATTLE – He wore Coke-bottle glasses as a child, a remnant of a premature birth. As a sixth-grader, Al Gehri started hauling a briefcase to school each day.
A nerd to some, Gehri won the hearts and minds of his Federal Way High School classmates, finally winning an election to become student body president.
Later in life, he won the respect and admiration of thousands with whom he worked and represented in 25 years as a Snohomish County deputy prosecutor.
Several hundred of those people – including lawyers and police officers – gathered Monday at the Museum of Flight here to remember Gehri and celebrate the life of a friend.
Gehri died March 4 after an automobile accident. The cause of the accident is under investigation, a Washington State Patrol spokeswoman said.
“He was an honorable man with high integrity,” said Pat Slack, commander of the Snohomish Regional Drug Task Force, where Gehri worked the last three years. “He was the person who told you what you had to hear; not what you wanted to hear.”
Gehri will be remembered as humorous, diligent, hard working, attentive, mischievous, pleasant, compassionate and bright. He was a man who overcame the handicap of a bad eye, often reading with his face literally in a book or document.
Gehri started as a deputy prosecutor, at first taking on drunken drivers in District Court before graduating to felonies where he prosecuted rapists, murderers and those accused of vehicular homicide.
A former supervisor, deputy prosecutor Randy Yates, recalled seeing Gehri bent over papers scouring for details.
“He didn’t miss a thing,” Yates said.
In one case, a defendant relied on a malady suffered in the Vietnam War as an excuse for his criminal actions. An expert witness was about to bolster that claim.
When the expert got on the witness stand, Gehri hinted at what he learned by paying attention to detail, Yates said.
“Would you change your opinion if the defendant never went to Vietnam?” Gehri asked the expert. Gehri then revealed that the closest the defendant got to Vietnam was Southern California, Yates said.
Friend Joyce Yates recalled that in the 1980s when young professionals in her husband’s office decided to delay having children, the Yates family kept growing.
Gehri thought that was great.
“Al made me immediately feel respected and valued,” Joyce Yates said.
In a memo to deputy prosecutors, Prosecuting Attorney Janice Ellis said there were four pillars in Gehri’s life: the law and law enforcement; Tasha his cat; a family home on Hood Canal; and his companion of 22 years, Megan Graves, a Seattle attorney.
Ellis recalled Monday the big laugh originating from the office next to hers when they both worked in the civil division of the prosecutor’s office. She’d playfully throw a shoe at Gehri’s feet to get him to stop.
Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart summed up Gehri’s life.
“He had a big heart and a great mind,” Bart said. “When he prosecuted a case he did it with both.”
Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or haley@heraldnet.com.
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