Saying farewell to O.C.’s fighter for ‘los otros’
-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
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 otros — 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.”
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The article portrays Federico Sayre as a commanding, larger-than-life trial lawyer whose four-decade career was defined by an unwavering commitment to “los otros” — the marginalized and maligned — from Central Valley farmworkers to victims of police brutality in Orange County and Los Angeles.
It emphasizes that Sayre’s pursuit of justice crossed ideological and demographic lines: he offered pro bono help to farmworker groups, pushed for accountability in high-profile police violence cases such as the Rodney King civil settlement, and represented clients ranging from Latina immigrants to even white supremacists, underscoring a belief that everyone deserved a fair day in court.
The piece situates his legal activism in a lifelong pattern of rebellion in the service of principle, tracing it back to Vietnam War protests that led to conflict with his Mexican immigrant parents, and to his choice to pursue elite education at Princeton and UC Berkeley rather than follow a more conventional professional path.
It presents his Catholic faith not as separate from his work but as central to it, noting his service as a lector and Eucharistic minister and recounting how his parish priest linked Sayre’s life to the Gospel blessing on those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” suggesting that his litigation and community activism were expressions of religious conviction.
The article underscores Sayre’s personal generosity and everyday solidarity: hosting unhoused children for lunch and Bible study, delaying his own family’s Christmas until he could identify a local family in need, and routinely attending community events to offer free legal advice or financial support to causes he believed in.
Through the voices of colleagues, staff and mentees, it describes him as a mentor who deliberately opened doors for others — encouraging a young driver to go back to school, inspiring a law clerk to envision a nonprofit for underprivileged Latinos, and pushing his team to give to charity and volunteer — framing mentorship as a key part of his legacy.
The piece highlights the emotional impact of his death on a broad cross section of the community, from seasoned attorneys to parishioners, to illustrate how deeply embedded he was in Orange County’s legal and Latino communities and how those networks saw him as both a fierce advocate in court and a paternal, stabilizing presence in their personal lives.
It aligns Sayre with a generation of Latino lawyers and judges who, in the view of the article and quoted mourners, used the law to carve out space and dignity for a community long treated as outsiders in Orange County courts, and it implicitly challenges younger professionals to “be more like Fred” by rediscovering that level of public engagement and courage.
The article also reinforces his reputation as a wrongful-death and serious injury litigator beyond the most famous cases, echoing other coverage that noted his work for grieving families in catastrophic accidents, which helped cement his image as a courtroom champion for those who had “never gotten a break in life.”[1]
Finally, it frames Sayre’s life as a kind of moral invitation: through anecdotes from his children and friends, the piece suggests that his “nose for injustice” and insistence on using talent “in the service of others” should serve as a model for how law, faith and personal generosity might be woven together in contemporary public life.
Different views on the topic
In contrast to the article’s celebratory tone, some law-enforcement advocates and police union representatives have long argued that attorneys who specialize in police-misconduct and wrongful-death suits contribute to what those critics describe as a “lawsuit culture,” contending that large settlements in brutality or shooting cases can strain municipal budgets, encourage risk-averse or “defensive” policing, and unfairly vilify officers who operate in dangerous, split-second conditions.
Commentators sympathetic to police often stress that many officer-involved shootings are deemed legally justified after internal and external investigations, and they argue that high-profile civil suits — especially when accompanied by intense media coverage — may present an incomplete or one-sided narrative that focuses on victims’ suffering while giving less weight to the chaotic, threatening circumstances officers report facing.
Tort-reform proponents, including some policy analysts and business-aligned organizations, have criticized aspects of the plaintiffs’ bar that handle civil-rights and wrongful-death cases, asserting that exceptionally large verdicts or settlements can result in significant attorney fees and inconsistent outcomes, and arguing that systemic problems such as police violence, poverty and homelessness are better addressed through legislative reform and improved public policy rather than through individual lawsuits.
Within Orange County and similar communities, some political and civic voices have resisted framing Latino residents primarily through the lens of victimization or structural injustice, contending that local institutions have diversified over time and that a continued emphasis on discrimination in legal and political narratives can deepen racial or ethnic polarization instead of reinforcing a shared civic identity.
In debates over high-profile cases like those involving police shootings, opponents of expansive civil liability sometimes argue that repeated lawsuits and public condemnations of departments can undermine morale, hamper recruitment and retention of officers, and complicate efforts at collaborative reform by creating an adversarial climate between city attorneys, police leadership and community advocates.
Among certain Catholic and Christian commentators, there is also a strand of opinion that views confrontational public activism and high-profile litigation with caution, emphasizing personal holiness, parish life and works of mercy over courtroom battles; from this perspective, blending a pugnacious trial-lawyer style with religious identity can risk drawing the church into partisan conflict or overshadowing quieter forms of service.
Some critics of the broader civil-rights litigation model question whether individual impact cases, even when successful, sometimes deliver symbolic victories that do not translate into long-term structural change, suggesting that resources devoted to complex lawsuits might in some instances be more effectively used to fund community-based programs, grassroots organizing or policy advocacy that targets root causes of inequality rather than its most egregious individual manifestations.
Additionally, skeptics of the plaintiffs’ bar note that wrongful-death and catastrophic-injury litigation, including suits like those mentioned in local coverage of Sayre’s work, can be deeply adversarial and emotionally draining for all parties, and they argue that greater emphasis on mediation, restorative justice, or administrative remedies might offer more constructive paths to accountability and healing than protracted courtroom fights.[1]
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
William Mulholland was the water boss who made L.A. possible. His reputation gave him unchecked authority as a dam builder. In 1928, that led to one of America’s deadliest disasters--and the question of whether it was a crime.
It started as a ploy to scare Texas out of redrawing its congressional map and ended with California voters approving a new map of their own, one that could hat could help alter the balance of power in Washington.
On this week’s episode of Boiling Point, Miranda Green speaks with Los Angeles Times climate reporter Hayley Smith about how AI bots are meddling in California’s clean energy policymaking.
