The Ritual of Serving Others

In the early 2000s, Mo Hamoudi felt alone in the world. 

His mother, Shucooh Niazmand, sick with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, had returned to Iran and died a year earlier. His only other family member, elder sister Leyla, had gone with her. But to Hamoudi, Iran no longer felt like home; he remained in the States. 

Then Al-Qaeda terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, not far from where he lived in New York City. Now he feared he might no longer be accepted in his adopted country. That brought back difficult childhood memories of struggling to fit in: “I felt as though I was back in Houston, where I’d first arrived as a 9 year old.”

Hamoudi had what he believes was a nervous breakdown. “I got very close to taking my own life,” he says. But a voice in his head told him: It’s not time. You’ve still got work to do. So he checked himself into a hospital—a move that would be the key to unpacking a traumatic childhood and steering him into a career as an attorney. 

Today, Hamoudi works at Seattle-based Stritmatter Law, where he represents victims of serious personal injuries and civil rights violations. He was lead attorney in the case of Derrick Clark Jr., a Black man shot in the back eight times by a sheriff’s deputy and state patrolman in Clackamas County, Oregon, and left for two hours to die, while body-cam footage recorded officers jeering.

“The reason excessive force often happens is because the police do not see themselves in these men,” Hamoudi says. “They see something else, and they fear it.”

Hamoudi was born in Tehran in 1977, just before the overthrow of the Shah and ensuing eight-year war with Iraq. During air-raid blackouts, the family would gather to play board games by candlelight, while bombs from Iraqi MiGs exploded in the distance. 

His mother was determined to leave before Hamoudi reached the age of conscription. Hamoudi’s stepfather had been born in Pakistan, so the parents leveraged family ties to immigrate to Karachi. That wasn’t much better. Hamoudi remembers clinging to his stepfather on the back of a moped after a bomb explosion sent bloodied men running through the marketplace. Through family connections—the stepfather’s brother—they immigrated again, this time to Houston.

In school, Hamoudi’s teacher told him to memorize the national anthem, and he recited it in front of the class. Then she told him to recite the state anthem. He could not. Everyone laughed. 

It was a hard experience for a kid with a deep need to belong. “I just didn’t know how,” Hamoudi recalls.

Things were better after the family moved to Terra Linda, California. His new teacher introduced him and assigned classmates to welcome him. Several are still in touch today. 

Hamoudi caught up academically, 

played basketball, and got a job at a pizzeria. He calls the people who were there for him along the way “the helpers.” One of those was a police officer who found Hamoudi, his mother and his sister sheltering in a park one night, away from his stepfather’s violent temper. The officer took the family to a motel.

Abuse by men was a culturally informed practice in Iran and Pakistan, says Hamoudi, and the whole family had been assaulted by the stepfather from the time they’d lived in Tehran. Hamoudi’s mother learned that, in this country, she had rights. She had her husband arrested. Eventually, he was deported. 

As Hamoudi came of age, he straddled two worlds, living in a poor family in wealthy Marin County. He began his career in real estate, hoping to earn a lot of money, but his cynicism broke his mother’s heart. “I was making $3,000 to $4,000 a month, and I was becoming confident and arrogant,” he says. “She encouraged me to go back to Iran and reconnect with my roots.” 

He did it for a summer, then moved to New York City, where he worked as a bartender while studying acting, writing and poetry. But his mother’s death and 9/11 untethered him. This time, the hospital staff and his therapists were the helpers. 

“I developed a faith, beyond logic, that I had endured these things I did not choose for something greater,” Hamoudi says. 

Not long after, he decided to pursue a new career path. “The law provided me a vehicle to help people, and advocate for those who could not advocate for themselves,” he says.

He returned to California to earn his J.D. While in law school, he met his future wife, Kathie, married, and they had a son, Jude. His sister, Leyla, also found her way back to California, where she married, had two daughters, and began a career in real estate.

Hamoudi’s career took him to Seattle, where he worked as a federal public defender for eight years and taught trial advocacy as an adjunct professor at Seattle University School of Law. 

In 2023, he left the public defender’s office to practice civil law, where he felt he could better hold institutions accountable. 

“There’s nothing that brings Mo more joy than being able to help others,” says Karen Koehler, managing partner at Stritmatter. “He embraces all of who he is—the traumatized person, the happy person, the successful person, the person who was marginalized. And that’s made him a person who doesn’t run from adversity.”

Last year, Koehler and Hamoudi teamed up to co-host a podcast called The Velvet Hammer—a nickname Koehler discovered she was being called by defense lawyers. The show explores the human side of working as a trial lawyer. Recent episodes have included: challenges faced by female trial lawyers; SLAPP lawsuits used to silence abuse survivors; and the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officers in Minneapolis.

Hamoudi says his work as a lawyer rewards not only his clients but himself. “The ritual of serving others,” he says, “is what has helped me get out of my own head.”

On the Iran War

“I feel two things: gratitude that I made it out, but also guilt. Why me? Why do I get the benefit of the opportunities that have been graced upon me? Then I feel grateful, and it reinforces this idea of having a responsibility to serve. People try to talk to me about the politics of what’s happening. I say, ‘I’m not a political leader. I’m not a military person. The perspective I’m coming from is a child in a home, where there were blackouts and bombs blowing up in the distance. That child doesn’t understand politics or military objectives. That child feels the world is an unsafe place, and their reality is unsafe. It’s very damaging.’”