In passing

Ken Hansen, who spent three decades trying to convince the U.S. government that the Samish Indian Nation wasn’t extinct and deserved treaty fishing rights, died Wednesday, tribal officials said. He was 53.

Hansen was a diabetic and had heart problems and other chronic illnesses.

Hansen gained attention in the 1980s when he petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service for listing under the Endangered Species Act, noting that his San Juan Islands-area tribe and several others had been dropped from a tribe list prepared by a Bureau of Indian Affairs clerk in 1969.

The Samish, which were federally recognized under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, were also excluded in a federal judge’s 1974 ruling on allocation of fishing rights.

Thirty years later, in January 2005, a federal appeals court panel helped clear the way for the Samish tribe to acquire a share of the state salmon catch.

Portsmouth, Va.

Carl Brashear, deep-sea diver

Carl M. Brashear, 75, the Navy’s first black master deep-sea diver who later successfully fought to continue his undersea career after he became an amputee, died July 25 at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Va. He had respiratory and heart ailments.

Brashear made several efforts to interest filmmakers in his life story before Cuba Gooding Jr. played him in the 2000 film “Men of Honor.”

A sharecropper’s son with minimal formal schooling, Brashear joined the Navy in 1948 and endured years of racial taunts, even death threats, as he pushed ahead for what he hoped would be a glamorous diving career.

In 1966, he lost half of his left leg in a shipboard accident. After a long struggle in physical therapy and using an artificial leg, he became the Navy’s first amputee diver. He retired in 1979 at the top enlisted rank of master chief petty officer.

WASHINGTON

Vincent Fuller, Hinckley attorney

Vincent J. Fuller, the star Washington attorney who successfully defended would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, has died in a suburban Maryland hospice. He was 75.

Fuller, who lived in Bethesda, Md., died Wednesday of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

During his career Fuller defended a number of notables, including boxer Mike Tyson and Teamster union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

But he was best known for his successful insanity defense of Hinckley, who shot President Reagan, press secretary James Brady and two law enforcers outside a Washington hotel on March 30, 1981.

Fuller, retained within hours of the shooting, centered his defense on Hinckley’s mental state, maintaining the shooter was delusional and obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster.