Teresa Catherine Panepinto

Teresa Catherine Panepinto

ALTAMONT — An adventurous girl, Teresa Catherine Panepinto grew up to be a woman who was not afraid to take risks to help others.

“She always had this sense of caring, of devotion, being willing to advocate and fight for whoever was ignored,” said her father, Bill Panepinto.

Over the course of her too-short life, she helped Mexican migrants, people with disabilities, human-rights activists in Colombia, and homeless veterans.

“All who knew Teresa saw her as a strong, independent woman, passionate for social justice and devoted to her family and friends,” wrote her mother, Tomassina Panepinto.

Ms. Panepinto died unexpectedly in a hospital in Oakland, California on Monday, April 3, 2017, with her loving family and several close friends at her bedside. She was 41.

Her family moved to Altamont when she was 3. Ms. Panepinto was the middle of three children, with an older brother, Bill, and a younger brother, Vince. Her parents were both social workers.

“From an early age, she connected with the ideas of social justice and helping other people,” her father said.

“She was always adventurous,” said her mother. “In middle school, she said she had to go to New York City to do research for a paper.” She went; the paper was on artist Edward Gorey.

She liked music and played the piano as a girl. At Farnsworth Middle School, she took up the contrabass. “She worked hard at it and played in the Empire State Repertory Orchestra,” said her father. “She would get invested in something and see it through.”

He went on, “At 14, she decided to be a vegetarian. Whenever her mom made meatloaf, she’d call Ellen and say, ‘Can I come to your house for dinner?’” Ellen Schreibstein’s daughter, Maggie, one of Teresa’s good friends, was also a vegetarian.

As a junior at Guilderland High School, Ms. Panepinto researched colleges; she wanted to go to a small school in the Pacific Northwest and settled on Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. “When she was 17, she said, ‘I want to fly out to Portland...I’ll have my interview.’ The dean of admissions was so impressed she came by herself,” said her father. “She slept in a dorm there and it snowed that night. They said, ‘The New York girl brought us snow.’”

He also said, “She wanted a college setting with diversity to learn from other cultures. Willamette’s sister school is Tokyo University so she got to meet a lot of students from Tokyo.”

At Willamette University, Ms. Panepinto joined in the Rainbow Gatherings for hiking and camping. “She stayed with that group all through the years,” said her father.

While at college, where she studied sociology and Spanish, she worked at a clinic to help Mexican migrant workers and their families. “She became fluent in Spanish,” said her father.

After graduating in 1997, she worked for an organization in Eugene, Oregon, helping people with disabilities, called Mobility International USA.

Next, she worked in Colombia for Peace Brigades International. She told The Enterprise in 1998, after she got the assignment, that she had become interested in human rights in Latin America at St. Lucy’s Church in Altamont when she was growing up. “In the 1980s, they were involved helping different refugees from Central America seek refuge in Canada,” she said. “It piqued my interest in international issues, especially in Latin America and especially pertaining to human rights.”

She explained her work in Colombia, saying, “Peace Brigade volunteers try to help people working for human rights continue to work,” including members of human rights organizations, labor unions, women’s organizations, and workers for the rights of indigenous peoples.

“Many of these people have been harassed, or tortured, or their family members have and, for the most part, they live in a culture of terror and fear,” Ms. Panepinto said. As a volunteer, she accompanied these people on their daily rounds — at work, shopping, at home, in protests, wherever — “to deter potential aggressors,” she said.

After her work in Colombia, Ms. Panepinto settled in Oakland, California where, from 2000 to 2004, she worked as the director of a veterans’ hotline operated by the Central Coordinating Committee for Conscientious Objectors, a Quaker group.

“She lived in a community of older Chinese- and Japanese-Americans by Lake Merritt,” said her father.

Ms. Panepinto then went to the Boalt Hall School of Law of the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with a doctor of jurisprudence degree in 2007.

“She wanted one of the best,” said her father of the law school at Berkeley. “She worked hard.”

Ms. Panepinto became the director of legal services for Swords to Plowshares, serving homeless veterans and their families. She held that post from 2007 to 2015, stopping because of medical problems. “She was in a lot of pain,” said her mother.

Nevertheless, said her father, “She kept helping others.” Ms. Panepinto did pro bono work for veterans among other things.

She also kept in contact with her many different circles of friends. This included friends from the Rainbow Gatherings, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and the National Lawyers Guild — which her father described as “an alternative to the American Bar Association, a progressive group for civil rights and people on the margins.

Additionally, Ms. Panepinto was close to several children. “She never had children of her own,” said her father. “She loved the children of her family and friends and was a functional godmother to a number of them.”

Among the children who were special to her were: Forrestt, whom she’d known since he was 1; her niece Cassandra, now 14; Oona, the 7-year-old daughter of her girlhood friend, Anna Doyle; the daughter of Summer, a friend from Willamette University; the two sons of Miriam, another Willamette friend; and the two children of Nipa, a Bangladeshi she knew from from Swords to Ploughshares.

“She’d read them stories and spend time with them,” said her father.

“She was never jealous of the well-being of others,” said her mother.

“She took joy in other people’s children,” agreed her father.

“I talked with her on the phone every day,” said her mother. “We now have a big hole in our lives. But it’s a blessing she’s no longer in pain.”

“She passed away peacefully,” said her father.

****

Teresa Catherine Panepinto is survived by her parents, Bill and Tomassina Panepinto of Altamont; her brother Bill and his wife, Carol, and their daughter, Cassandra Panepinto of Altamont; and her brother Vince Panepinto of Chicago.

A memorial service will be held at St. Matthew’s Church in Voorheesville on Saturday, April 29, at 2 p.m.

Memorial contributions may be made to the National Lawyers Guild, 132 Nassau Street #922, New York, NY 10038 or online at nlb.org.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer

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