Community Mourns Murdered Mother Law Officers From Across State Join Family And Friends At Funeral For Patty Dibartolo

First came friends from Medical Lake, then colleagues from Telco Credit Union, then crisp, uniformed pairs of sheriff’s deputies from Snohomish, Skagit, Lincoln, Pierce and Spokane counties until more than 550 people filled St. Thomas More Catholic Church Friday.

Finally came the children of Patty DiBartolo, ages 9 to 20, who walked with their father before their mother’s casket.

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” asked the Rev. Tom Mele. For the answer he looked to Job, whose comfort was his faith.

“It doesn’t necessarily explain random violence, but it’s the only thing we can hang on to that gives us any sanity,” Mele said.

At a funeral Mass in which men wept and strangers handed Kleenex across the aisles, the slain mother of five was remembered.

DiBartolo, a loan officer and computer banking expert at Telco, was shot Saturday while walking with her husband, Deputy Tom DiBartolo, at Lincoln Park. She was 39.

The credit union where she earned a reputation for being a workaholic closed mid-day for only the second time in 25 years so the small staff could attend the service. The first time it closed was early Monday, when distraught co-workers could not open the doors, said Chief Executive Officer Tom Dougherty.

“We miss her and we don’t know how else to express it,” Dougherty explained. “When people were down, she was always up.”

“She was a life-giver, she was forever the pre-preeminent mother,” said Mele. “Her whole life she would take people in and mother them.”

Sheriff John Goldman was asked to speak at the funeral by DiBartolo, an 18-year veteran of his department. He said he remembers her dancing with her husband all night at Christmas parties “sometimes very much pregnant.”

Photographs of her life showed a woman beaming - from when she was pregnant with her oldest child Michelle to Michelle’s wedding two years ago.

“We only found one picture that she wasn’t smiling and that was probably because she was breathing in (during childbirth),” her husband told mourners.

A graduate of Ferris High School, DiBartolo was a self-taught numbers whiz who was hired for an accounting job, then branched into computer banking and loans with lightening speed.

Each day at 3 p.m., the telephone started ringing as the working mother fielded calls from children checking in after school. When her daughter Katrina did odd-jobs at the credit union, the mother and daughter wore similar clothes, from sunflowers to pinstripes.

She never spent a birthday, childbirth or holiday without her sister, Bobbie Jean Harrison of Medical Lake. The Harrisons even moved into DiBartolo’s neighborhood so they could share the simpler things: homemade doughnuts on Sunday mornings, each other’s children, walks by Clear Lake.

“I’m not embarrassed by these tears, because Patty earned every ounce of pain I feel,” Harrison said, her voice breaking.

There was nothing subtle about DiBartolo, family members said, from her voice and laughter to her way of taking charge.

She had an immense fear of water that she overcame, with her husband’s help, through scuba diving. She joined the Spokane County Emergency Services Water Rescue Team. For years, Deputy DiBartolo worked marine boat patrol.

Harrison called Tom DiBartolo “the great love” of her sister’s life. Family surrounded the children they raised Friday: Michelle Robinson, 20, Nicholas, 17, Katrina, 14, Johnathan, 11, and Lindsey, 9.

Their father, wearing a black suit and moving stiffly after being wounded in the shooting incident, embraced friends before and after the funeral. At the end of the service, he stood to speak.

“Oh my God,” someone gasped audibly.

“A lot of people told me, ‘DiBartolo just sit down and shut up for once.’ If you know me at all you know that’s not about to happen.”

He went on to thank friends and said his wife gave him the greatest gift, herself, and five beautiful children.

“I could give Patty no greater gift than to always love her and raise her children as she would want me to.”

There have been no arrests in the shooting. DiBartolo said he told detectives on the case to go home and hug their wife and kids, “to reach out and grasp life because it can be gone in a flash.”

Then, as a vocalist sang Garth Brooks’ “The Dance,” he stood touching the closed casket, then bent to kiss it.

Next to him, his children bowed their heads. The girls wore burgundy and blue dresses, their shiny hair curled and braided as though dressed for the holidays, at this, their mother’s funeral.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos