08/04/2024
My lifelong friend and mentor, a world-class wrestler and fellow Roxbury Latin School graduate, Dr. Richard Sullivan, died today after a long bout of degenerative brain disease.
Rick was one of the kindest, warmest, funniest and most generous people I have ever known. He was my friend since he used to come play poker with my dad Nick at our house in the early 1970s. Like me, he was an awkward misfit who found redemption in the utter fairness of wrestling (you only go up against people your own size and the harder you work, the better you do unlike all those lesser sports), albeit at an infinitely higher level.
When Rick was not out healing the sick in various Boston-area emergency rooms, he took me, Chris, and Courtney Henry under his wing to the YMC Union in the Combat Zone to train. He'd have us carry each other up nine flights of stairs; live weight was always best for wrestling. He introduced Courtney, a superstar, to the Harvard team.
When I started my own law practice, Rick invested sweat equity with me as a pro bono expert witness on a number of cases, to the great benefit of our clients. His tireless work directly led to one trial acquittal and to a $1 million jury verdict in the first five years of my law practice.
In those cases, Rick testified about gunshot angles and broken jaws, par for the course for a big city ED doc. In one case, he demonstrated that my client was running from police when they shot him. In another, he showed that the last shot the police fired entered the back of my client's husband's head.
He testified that Jesse Brewer's jaw was broken, and, in a trial with Adam D. Perlmutter, that Stevie Tatum's jaw would never heal. He never wanted to be paid for his work, but eventually he was. His availability--or rather his expertise, enthusiasm, and jury appeal--effectively capitalized my fledgling civil rights practice starting around 2006. Rick believed in me and in the icause of exposing wanton police and prison violence.
Rick possessed a quick Irish wit and impish optimism. He never took himself or anyone else too seriously. He talked your ear off, but always listened. He taught me the maxim that there is almost no situation so dismal that a policeman can't make it worse.
There is nothing tragic about Rick's passing at the ripe age of 87 but his last years were tough. Signs of his cognitive difficulties were already showing several years back and a couple of years ago I resigned myself to the fact I would not have a normal conversation with him. My father Nick, a great friend, visited him frequently even as the visits grew more and more frustrating. My sister Jennifer Margulis also adored him. Rick leaves behind his loving wife Janet and a flood of memories that will bless me and my family and many of my friends for as long as we walk this earth.
