Passages last week

Travis D. Pfister, 27, a Marine sergeant from Richland, was one of five Marines and two Navy medics who died Feb. 7 when their helicopter was shot down in Iraq.

Donald Deasy, 68, who joined Windermere Real Estate when the company was getting started and helped transform the Pacific Northwest real-estate business into a more professional, service-oriented field, died Jan. 30 in Seattle of esophageal cancer.

Jesse Tanner, 79, mayor of Renton from 1996 to 2003, during which time the city acquired some of its most prominent landmarks, died Feb. 6 in Renton. He had been in declining health from heart problems for the past year.

John Hamilton Dawson, 80, who taught surgery for more than 20 years at the University of Washington and was chief of surgery at Swedish Hospital Medical Center from 1992 to 1996, died of leukemia Feb. 7 on Mercer Island.

Shannon J. Wall, 87, a former president of the National Maritime Union who won veteran status for merchant seamen after World War II, died Feb. 2 in Sequim.

Charles Rudolph Walgreen Jr., 100, former chairman and president and son of the founder of the drugstore chain that bears his name, died Feb. 10 in Northfield, Ill.

Charles Norwood Jr., 65, a blunt-spoken Republican congressman from Georgia who sold his dental practice and ran for Congress in 1994, died Tuesday in Augusta, Ga., after battling cancer and lung disease.

Peter Ellenshaw, 93, an Academy Award-winning special-effects artist who worked on Disney classics such as "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" and "Mary Poppins," for which he won his Oscar, died Monday in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Bent Skovmand, 61, a plant scientist who helped oversee creation of a "doomsday vault" to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds in case of disaster, died Feb. 6 in Kavlinge, Sweden, of complications from a brain tumor.

Marianne Fredriksson, 79, one of Sweden's most admired and translated writers, whose international best-sellers included "According to Mary Magdalene," "Simon's Family" and "Hanna's Daughters," died of a heart attack last Sunday in Osterskar, Sweden.

Charles Langford, 84, a former Alabama state senator who fought in key civil-rights legal battles as a lawyer for Rosa Parks and the organization that launched the historic Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, died last Sunday in Montgomery.

Angelo "Sonny" Mercurio, 70, a member of the New England mafia who helped the FBI bug a mob induction ceremony for the first time in 1989, leading to the prosecution of dozens of people, died in December of a pulmonary embolism, a family member said Monday. He was living in Little Rock, Ark., in the witness-protection program.

Michael Shurtleff, 86, a top Broadway casting director in the 1960s and '70s who wrote "Audition," a best-selling book for actors, died Jan. 28 in Los Angeles.

Julio Ochoa Ruelas, 62, a co-founder and first president of Duke's So. Cal, the oldest lowrider car club in continuous existence in the world, died of heart failure Jan. 21 in Los Angeles. The Ruelas brothers have spent 40 years heading up a car club that has 29 chapters, including one in Japan.