With his large build, booming voice and suits as sharp as his mind, Federico Sayre commanded every room he entered.
For nearly 40 years as an attorney, he used that presence to fight for the maligned like few others.
He offered pro bono legal aid to farm worker groups in the Central Valley and won headline-making settlements for police brutality victims in Orange County, from Latina immigrants to white supremacists. In Los Angeles, he was part of the team that won Rodney King a $3.8-million civil settlement against the city. He represented the families of Ezell Ford, shot to death by Los Angeles police officers, and David Ordaz Jr., shot to death by an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy, spurring calls for reform at both agencies.
“I have one word for what young lawyers should do: It’s justice,” Sayre told the Orange County Register in 2006. “I have to fight for justice.”
I’d always joke with him whenever we ran into each other in courthouses or at press conferences, asking what was the next righteous case he was working on. He frequently would go to community open houses and make himself available to anyone who needed legal advice and was as free with his checkbook to financially support various causes as he was with his opinion about the politics of the day. But as I talked to mourners at Sayre’s funeral at his home parish of St. Cecilia Church in Tustin, Calif., on Monday, I realized that his fight for justice manifested in many other ways.
Attorneys Henry Brown and Tim Black were among the first people to show up. They worked alongside Sayre in the early 2000s, when he made national headlines after settling a wrongful death lawsuit for $2 million on behalf of the family of a man killed by a tow truck driver who tested positive for meth.
“Fred was a very gracious, generous man and made sure that people who didn’t get a break in life got a fair shot in the courtroom,” said Brown, using Sayre’s nickname.
“He liked the heat of the battle,” Black added, “and he was always willing to go into it.”
Raul Parra was Sayre’s case manager for the last seven years of a career that continued even after a Catholic priest administered last rites in December and didn’t end until a few weeks before Sayre, 78, died at his Buena Park home May 31 from kidney failure.
“He was always caring for his fellow mexicanos,” said Parra, 32. “He always encouraged us to give back — to give to charity and just volunteer as much as possible.”
Ali Hamid drove from Chatsworth to pay homage to the man he described “as my mentor, my father figure, my everything.” He first impressed Sayre as a law clerk 20 years ago for his smarts and “because I spoke Spanish and he didn’t know many people of Middle Eastern heritage who did.”
Hamid, 46, wants to start a nonprofit to help underprivileged Latinos. “I wish I asked him even more questions than I did — and I asked a lot,” he said, his voice catching. “Losing him breaks my heart.”
Sayre was causing good trouble going back to when he led protests against the Vietnam War at the University of Arizona, which led his father to kick him out of the family’s Tucson home after seeing his son on television. Sayre defied his Mexican immigrant parents again by earning a master’s in public affairs from Princeton University instead of following his dad into railroad engineering, before earning a law degree from UC Berkeley.
“He became accustomed to being rebellious in all the ways,” said Anamaria Artemisa Sayre, one of his three children and an NPR host and producer.
The 27-year-old remembered a father who loved to take his children on road trips but also urged them to always think about los demás — the others. On Fridays, her father and mother, Desiree, hosted unhoused children for lunch and Bible study at their home. Unwrapping Christmas presents didn’t start until her father read the newspaper to see if a local family needed help celebrating the holidays.
“It was like he had a nose for injustice,” Anamaria said. “He looked for it everywhere and when he found it, he couldn’t stop until he did something about it.”
Most of the pews in St. Cecilia, where Sayre served as a Eucharistic minister and lector, were filled for his memorial mass. Anamaria and her brother, John Paul, read passages from the Bible from a pulpit framed by flowers and a portrait of Sayre. Father Quyen Truong followed by telling parishioners what a devout Catholic Sayre was.
The mourners chuckled as Truong described how Sayre always looked for a parish when he traveled, then wiped tears from their eyes when the priest revealed that Sayre died in his sleep just hours after attending Mass.
Truong repeated one of the blessings from the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
“Federico spent much of his life doing exactly that which Jesus said,” Truong said as Sayre’s children put their arms around each other. “Continue his legacy. Use your talents in the service of others.”
Daughter Evangelina Sayre followed with a short eulogy that compared her dad’s diverse interests in social justice to the gorgeous hues of his beloved Sonoran Desert.
“My dad was a creative, and the law was his art form,” she said. “He fought for the underdog, because he was the underdog.”
Most of the audience joined Sayre’s family afterward at St. Cecilia’s gym for a lunch starring tamales and donuts — two of his favorite foods. Poster boards featured photos from throughout his life. A female quartet readied to play mariachi standards as Anamaria greeted well wishers. One of them was immigration attorney and fellow St. Cecilia parishioner Lisa Ramirez.
“Your dad was the best lector because of that big voice of his!” she said as Anamaria nodded and smiled. Ramirez called Sayre a “trailblazer” and part of a generation of Orange County lawyers and judges who fought to bring justice to their fellow Latinos in a county that long treated them as outsiders.
“Their generation was able to change and do things we don’t continue to do,” Ramirez said. “My generation needs to give back more. We need to stand up more. We need to fight back more. We need to be more like Fred.”
To the side stood private investigator Carmelo Castañeda. He met Sayre as a 20-year-old personal driver tasked with taking the attorney from Orange County to his firm’s offices in Santa Monica. The routine continued for years until Sayre encouraged him to enroll in school and think bigger.
“I’d look at him and think, ‘What’s this guy smoking? I wasn’t going to go leave him to do something else,’” said Castañeda, now 57.
He looked around as more people streamed in.
“And yeah, I got another job thanks to Fred,” he said. “But I never left him. None of us ever did. None of us ever will.”
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