‘She just had a big heart’
Robin Shellow, a lawyer who championed juvenile defendants and victims of police misconduct, has died.
Larry and Kathleen Trammell were desperate for answers when their son died after an encounter with West Milwaukee police in 2017. They’d spoken to a couple of lawyers, but none of them seemed right.
“We prayed for us to get the right lawyer,” Larry Trammell said.
They found Milwaukee attorney Robin Shellow. She reviewed the police reports, which showed that their son, Adam, 22, had died after West Milwaukee police broke into his apartment and tased him repeatedly as he showered.
“She was so upset when she came back from the police station. It was almost like it was her kid,” Larry Trammell recalled. “She said, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to get justice.’”
Shellow, along with attorney Mark Thomsen, helped the Trammells obtain a $2.5 million civil settlement from the City of West Milwaukee. She also spent countless hours comforting and supporting the couple through the pain of their son’s death.
“We’re just so grateful that God placed her in our life at the time we needed her the most,” Kathleen Trammell said. “She was such a big help to our family. She just had a big heart.”
Shellow died Thursday following a stroke. She was 62.
Born in Milwaukee in 1958, Shellow earned a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College, as well as a second bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from Cambridge University in England. She received her law degree from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, in 1986 and returned to Milwaukee to practice.
Shellow was inspired to become a lawyer by her parents, Gilda and James Shellow, who practiced together until Gilda’s death in 2005.
Her father taught her about law from a young age, Shellow said in an email to a reporter, which she wrote
while battling life-threatening health problems in 2014.
She first discovered the definition of a good cross examination in the Milwaukee County Safety Building when she was 8, she wrote.
“A good cross was when my dad would ask the witness a question and swivel around in the chair and wink at his daughter and say to the witness: ‘Take your time. It isn’t in there, is it?’ ”
She went on: “My dad knew trials were frightening to me. He knew it was all that stood between me and God on judgment day … and for me, being a lawyer was judgment day every day — for someone.”
Shellow and her older sister, Jill, an attorney in New York, literally grew up in their parents’ law office, which for a time was located in their home, Jill Shellow recalled. As grade-schoolers, they spent a lot of time putting pamphlets about new cases into law books, since that was the only time they were allowed to climb the library ladder attached to the office bookshelves.
During the civil rights era, their parents represented the Rev. James Groppi, one of the leaders of Milwaukee’s fair housing marches; and the Rev. Michael Cullen, a member of the Milwaukee 14 who stole draft records from the city’s selective service office and set them on fire.
“When people arrived to strategize about those cases, our mom would come and wake us up and we could come downstairs in our little girl nightgowns, and sit and listen, talk to and meet the people who were there,” Jill Shellow recalled. “That was often accompanied
“My parents had a commitment to people in need, whether they were disadvantaged because of money or disadvantaged because of their backgrounds or disadvantaged because of their politics . ... Robin had no children, so she tried to teach and pass on that quality to her colleagues in the bar.”
Jill Shellow Robin Shellow’s older sister
by cookies and milk, and then we would go back to bed.”
A drive to help children and teens
Robin Shellow was always passionate about helping children involved in the criminal justice system, said attorney Dean Strang, a friend of 35 years.
Shellow’s creativity and empathy served her clients well, he said.
“Her great strength was in displaying, gathering and presenting the full humanity of her client, and making it compelling, and urging us not to turn away from that,” he said. Shellow’s father agreed.
“Her best quality was a sort of quiet ability to figure out why people were acting as they were, to really sort through the motivations of persons with whom she worked and for whom she acted as a lawyer,” he said.
That ability was on full display in the early 1990s, when Shellow represented Felicia Morgan, a 17-year-old charged in adult court with killing another teen, according to Celeste Williams, then a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal
“Robin was passionate,” Williams said. “She had a fierce sense of justice and knew that as a lawyer, she wielded a kind of power that she wanted to use to help those who had none.”
Morgan’s homicide conviction carried a mandatory life sentence, but Shellow convinced the judge to allow an opportunity for parole.
“She was like no other lawyer I had ever encountered,” Williams said. “Robin wrote Felicia’s life story in the many court filings and briefs she presented, as if she was her biographer, painting a picture of a young woman who was immersed in abuse and violence for her entire life, but who was worthy of grace.”
Shellow’s most high-profile case in recent years was that of Derek Williams (no relation to Celeste Williams), who died after begging for help and gasping for breath in the back of a Milwaukee police squad car in 2011. The district attorney’s office had declined to prosecute the officers involved and none had been disciplined by the Police Department.
Shellow represented Williams’ mother, Sonya Moore. Shellow helped Moore obtain and publicize the in-car video of her son’s death, which galvanized protests against police misconduct in Milwaukee.
Shellow also helped two women who were sexually assaulted by law enforcement obtain multi-million-dollar court settlements.
Shellow’s drive to help people through her work as an attorney continued their parents’ legacy, her sister said.
“My parents had a commitment to people in need, whether they were disadvantaged because of money or disadvantaged because of their backgrounds or disadvantaged because of their politics, and that torch was carried on by Robin in Milwaukee,” Jill Shellow said. “Robin had no children, so she tried to teach and pass on that quality to her colleagues in the bar.”
‘A disarming sense of impishness’
While Shellow could be intense in the courtroom, she also had a “disarming sense of impishness” that helped sway unsympathetic judges, Strang said.
Williams saw that side of Shellow outside of court as well.
“The Robin I knew also chainsmoked; loved M*A*S*H reruns and adored her standard poodle dogs, with whom she had entire adult conversations,” Williams said. “She loved photo books and literature and finely crafted sentences and words that made you laugh and cry, and caused you rethink your positions about just about everything.”
Shellow is survived by her partner, Gene Mihleisen, whom she called “my rock” in her email to a reporter, her father, sister and a nephew, Aaron Shellow-Lavine.
In the email, Shellow asked that her obituary convey that “love is good.”
“In my heart and soul and down to my fingertips, I have known that my parents loved me more than life and ice cream and licorice combined, and as a result of knowing I was loved, they also taught me how to love,” she wrote.
She credited her former cardiologist, Dr. Bruce Wilson, with teaching her that the cells present in the brain’s limbic system, which controls emotion, are also present in the heart.
“After he helped me figure that out,” she wrote, “I learned that, as Judy Collins said, I could fly among the stars and no one would forget me.”