At the Mokelumne Hill Town Hall at 1:00 PM, on Sunday, April 25, friends of Jeff Tuttle, DA of Calaveras County and one of Moke Hill’s most beloved sons, will gather for refreshments, companionship, music, and storytelling --- all dedicated to Jeff’s memory. There will be a viewing the day before at San Andreas Memorial Chapel, Saturday, April 24, from 10 AM to 4 PM. The family suggests that those who are moved to express their love and respect for Jeff in a material way should contribute to a fund devoted to buying books for the Calaveras County Library, which has suffered a 100% reduction ($50,000) in the money available for book purchases. Make your check out to FOTL and mail it to Friends of the Library, Box 1551, San Andreas, CA 95249. (Or make a cash donation at the Sunday memorial.)
Jeff would appreciate that gesture, and each book will bear these words:
“In memory of Jeff Tuttle, Calaveras County District Attorney, 2000 to 2010.”
Estimates for those showing up to honor Jeff run as high as 500; the Pickle Patch, catering the food, feels it cannot do justice to more than 250. Arrangements are being made to wire the Hotel Leger so the music and reminiscences can be heard there as well as in the Town Hall, and the community is sure it can accommodate all of Jeff’s admirers.
Union Democrat article -
Calaveras County DA Jeff Tuttle dies of apparent heart attack
Written by Michael Kay, The Union
Democrat
April
20, 2010 10:37 am
Calaveras County District Attorney Jeffrey Tuttle died Sunday evening at Mark Twain St. Joseph’s Hospital from an apparent heart attack, according to his family. He was 59.
A longtime public servant to the county, Tuttle was in his 10th year as District Attorney, a position he reached after spending 17 years as County Counsel and four years as Public Defender.
Born in Palo Alto, Tuttle moved to Mokelumne Hill when he was 6 years old. His father moved the family to San Francisco and Mississippi to pursue jobs, and stints at college took Tuttle away again. Nonetheless, he spent most of his life in the small northern Calaveras County village. He attended Mokelumne Hill Elementary and then Calaveras High School. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with honors with a degree in anthropology.
Like many of the other students on the campus, which was a hotbed of activism and student unrest at the time, he wore his hair long, listened to the Jefferson Airplane and went to at least one Vietnam War protest. “Those were the best of all my years of being educated,” he said in a 2007 interview with The Union Democrat.
Following in a tradition that stretched back to his
great-great-grandfather, he went on to law school, attending the McGeorge
School of Law in Sacramento.
“I don’t think there was ever any question that Jeff was going to go
into the law,” said Donald Segerstrom, Tuolumne County district attorney,
who knew Tuttle professionally for two decades.
Once he had his law degree in hand, Tuttle tried working at a private
practice in Calaveras County, but was soon appointed deputy district
attorney by then-DA Joe Kiley, then left when he was offered the job of
County Counsel.
He served in that job for 17 years. But he grew tired of the position,
according to a biography released by his father, and stepped down to start a
private practice, “without notable success.”
He partnered with friend and fellow lawyer Gerald Osmer to set up a firm
whose main business was to handle the county’s public defender contract.
“He was really good to people,” said Osmer, who held the county’s public
defender’s contract for four years. “Sometimes, legally, there’s not a lot
you can do for them, but treating them nice and with dignity, and Jeff
always did that for everybody.”
Scott Gross, the chief defense attorney with the law firm that has
handled the county’s public defender’s contract since Tuttle became DA, said
that experience was part of the reason Tuttle was always an easy person to
work with.
“He had a good understanding of where we were coming from,” Gross said.
“A lot of times we didn’t always agree, but he was very professional.”
Tuttle was appointed District Attorney by the Board of Supervisors in
2000, after his predecessor resigned halfway through his term. He won the
election two years later with 70 percent of the vote, and was running
unopposed for reelection this year, as he had done the previous election.
Sheriff Dennis Downum said that while, like every sheriff and district
attorney, the two had occasional disagreements, Tuttle was a pleasure to
work with and made the two departments’ interactions much smoother.
“Before Jeff got there, there didn’t seem to be a lot of organization to
the office,” he said. “He really did organize it so that when there was a
case, we knew who to go to.”
Law was only one of Tuttle’s many passions — and by some accounts, not
his most ardent one.
The former anthropology major had a vast collection of opium pipes from
early Chinese Californians, some of which he recovered by digging in the
Sierra camp sites of the Chinese laborers who laid track for the Southern
Pacific Railroad.
He also had an extensive collection of mounted butterflies, all
collected from along the Calaveras River.
“He’d rather look at bugs than law books,” Phil McCartney, a friend of
Tuttle’s since boyhood, told The Union Democrat in 2007.
Most recently, McCartney said Monday, Tuttle had gotten hooked on a more
traditional Mother Lode pursuit: panning for gold.
“He liked to try a lot of different things,” he said. “He was just
interested in everything.”
Tuttle’s fascination for the natural world also dribbled over to his
investigations as a lawyer.
“His scientific curiosity manifested itself in his close inquiry into
the circumstances and cause of death in murder cases,” wrote his father in
the statement.
In one case, Tuttle told The Union Democrat in a 2007 interview, he was
defending a man accused of the stabbing death of his brother.
The brother had been found with more than a dozen stab wounds to the
chest, but his client proclaimed his innocence and suggested his brother had
killed himself. Tuttle gave the unlikely story a chance.
He found that the autopsy report showed shallow wounds — known as
hesitation wounds in stabbing suicides — and that the knife was found still
piercing the heart, indicating the final stab had killed the brother. The DA
at the time dropped the charges.
Tuttle’s death was wholly unexpected, said his stepmother, Sally. The
family has no history of heart disease.
Tuttle is survived by his wife, Galina, 31, and three children,
Victoria, 10, Ricky, 4, and Anna, 2.
He is also survived by his father, Richard, and stepmother, Sally, as
well as four siblings: Andrea Kornbluh, of Cincinnatti, Anna Villegas, of
Lodi, Cynthia Cowgill, of Mokelumne Hill, and Raglan Tuttle, of Chico.
He was preceded in death by his mother, Anna Fundulakis Tuttle, of
Sacramento, who died when he was 2.
Services will be announced when arrangements are completed.
http://www.uniondemocrat.com/2010042099748/News/Local-News/Calaveras-Cou...
Services are Sun 1pm at the Mokelumne Town Hall
