On April 27, Tom McGrann woke up at 4 a.m. and made coffee for him and his live-in partner, Kim Murray. He did laundry and then, as he was about to leave their Fremont condo for the airport, he said goodbye to all of his girls (Murray, 2 dogs and 2 cats) and that he was going to miss his little family.
Murray told him, have fun, have a great time. He was about to spend a week in sunny southern California, pet-sitting for one of his longtime landscaping clients and friends.
That night, McGrann didn’t call.
He was struck and killed by a commuter train in Del Mar, Calif. He was 42.
A Celebration of Thomas “Tom” Patrick McGrann’s life will take place tomorrow, May 29, at Brouwer’s Café (400 N. 35th St.) from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Those who knew McGrann and want to honor him by attending can e-mail monkeypetersen@gmail.com to RSVP.
By many accounts, he lived a full life.
Besides Murray, 43, the love of McGrann’s life was obvious to those who knew him: animals. He was the guy who took long walks, first with his dog Lucy (who he rescued from an abusive owner and carried in a wagon when she couldn’t walk for about a year); then with Murray’s two dogs, Kylie (aka K-bear) and Josie (aka Monkey Petersen – McGrann had a penchant for nicknames). Utah native Murray even has a doctorate degree in wildlife biology. McGrann grew up with cats and included in his merged family with Murray were two cats, Mother and Ruby. The former vet tech often took in strays and animals that needed extra help.
He loved animals so much, he didn’t think twice of flying down to Del Mar to help out Judith Gilliland, who met him when he was a foreman working on her North Beach yard. (She and her husband live part time in California, part time in Seattle.) She parted ways with the company that employed McGrann, but kept him on.
Working side-by-side year after year on the yard, they became friends.
“He was a really interesting combination of tough ex-Marine and a soft and sensitive plants and animal lover,” she said. “He was a walking conundrum.”
Tough might be an understatement. His younger brother, Mark, who works for a bio-pharmaceutical company and lives in Redmond, said his brother was an avid scuba diver who jumped into the saltwater side of the Locks when the Seahawks lost to the Packers in the playoffs a few years ago, and swam several hundred yards in nothing but his boxers.
His big brother, he recalls, received his full skiing certification as a teenager, and a ski instructor at Crystal Mountain. The two brothers had often made roundtrips between their childhood home in Port Angeles and Stevens Pass to ski. In Arizona, where their parents moved years later, the two had a memorable moment. “There were not a lot of good skiers, so we were jumping off these little cliffs, underneath the lift chairs, and everyone on the chairs was laughing and applauding. It was weird after being in Washington, getting standing ovations.”
The elder McGrann, born in Minneapolis, had spent his life since 2 in the state of Washington. Tom McGrann was a 1985 graduate of Lake Washington High School and a 1992 graduate of Central Washington University.
It had been awhile since the younger McGrann had seen his brother – last summer, when he met Murray, along with youngest sibling Cathy Wicke – but he had talked to him a few months ago. That’s how it went with Tom, he said. When things were going really well, it wasn’t unusual for the family not to hear from him that often.
“He was telling me how everything was going really well with Kim, they had moved in together, and he was trying to save up money for a down payment, they wanted to get a house,” Mark McGrann said. “They were really into making homemade pizzas, so they wanted to get a little house in Fremont, that area, and build a pizza oven. He told me how happy he and Kim were, that things were really falling into place and going well.”
Murray said that within their newly merged household, the vegan McGrann loved to cook. Homemade pizzas were a shared experience – sometimes with friends at dinner parties, but he also excelled at salads, soups and croutons that definitely are not your store-bought variety. These were mixed with garlic and olive oil and had this crispness that was, apparently, amazing. The night he died, Murray was making croutons.
“I thought he’d be so proud I made croutons,” she said.
The couple became a staple in downtown Fremont, frequenting the Fremont Sunday Market, PCC, ToST, yoga at Anytime Fitness and the place where they had their first date, Via Tribunali. Even though she worked 5 minutes from their condo, he sent her text messages that often made her laugh out loud, which she has saved and cherishes.
Tom McGrann was so gregarious, he knew everyone in his neck of Fremont –and it didn’t matter who you were, he wouldn’t hesitate to help.
“Once he came into the store, years ago, carrying first aid equipment,” said Nick Zouroudis, co-owner of Fremont store Petapoluza, who quickly became friends with McGrann shortly after his store opened three-and-a-half years ago. “He was going to go tape up Benny the rock stacker’s foot.”
It was that same spirit that propelled McGrann to go to Del Mar to help out Gilliland.
He’d been down there before to pet-sit for her on other occasions, and that day, as in previous ones, he’d spent at the beach. He donned a wet suit and while playing fetch with her black Lab, Tyler, he’d go into the water when the ball went in, with Tyler.
He went back up the hill to her house, soaked in the hot tub and relaxed for a bit, before going back down the hill for another walk. When he was hit by the commuter train, he was on his way back to the house with Tyler taking a sunset stroll.
The Village of Del Mar, Gilliland said, is small, made up of a couple of intersections off a main drag (Highway 101 – Camino Del Mar) and if you walk another block, you’re right at the beach. The railroad tracks are between beach and 101. The pedestrian bars that are there only came on after another train accident that caused fatalities.
“That train goes through that community at 50 mph, cars can only go 25. It comes up the hill and rounds the corner and it is right there, and they don’t blare the horn very soon, he had on headphones,” Gilliland said, noting he liked to listen to an eclectic variety of music, and especially loved KEXP. “I’m sure he thought he had cleared the tracks.”
As the last friend to have seen him, Gilliland said she was, and still, in some ways, is in denial.
“He was so active, that I thought that when he went sometime, I thought it’d be some mountain climbing thing, like he fell through a crevice, or back country skiing avalanche. But not this,” she said. She recalled a conversation he had with her about her sister’s prolonged illness. “He had said, I don’t want to go that way. I want to do something I love, go quickly and not see it coming.”