The hiker who died in a rock slide near Bell’s Canyon over the weekend was a prominent attorney who worked in Salt Lake City government — a man who was, according to colleagues, a good lawyer and a great friend.
The Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office identified the victim of Saturday’s slide in Little Cottonwood Canyon as David Mull, 49, of Salt Lake City. A spokesperson for Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall confirmed Monday that Mull was an attorney working for the city.
According to an obituary posted by Larkin Mortuary, Mull woke up at 4 a.m. Saturday to hike the Pfeifferhorn, the eighth-highest mountain in the Wasatch range. He reached the summit around 8:15 a.m. and sent his family a photo of him at the top.
A doctor hiking in the area found Mull shortly after that and performed first aid, according to a sheriff’s office release. Members of the office’s search-and-rescue team arrived about 8:45 a.m. Saturday. Despite lifesaving efforts, Mull was pronounced dead at the scene.
The search-and-rescue team estimated Mull fell about 700 feet in the slide. No one else was injured, the sheriff’s office said.
Mark Kittrell, a colleague in the City Attorney’s Office, said in a statement Tuesday that “Dave represented the best of what it means to be an attorney: He was smart, quick-witted, an excellent courtroom advocate, professional, honest, confident, a team player, and humble.”
Mull, Kittrell wrote, also “represented the best of what it means to be a great friend and colleague: funny, patient, understanding, collaborative, a mentor, caring, appreciative, and inclusive.”
As fellow staffers “have gathered to talk through and process our grief, a common theme emerges that we all want to be more like our friend Dave,” Kittrell wrote.
Mull joined the office in October 2019, Kittrell wrote. “He was a fantastic courtroom advocate,” Kittrell wrote. “He knew how to connect and persuade judges and juries on the most challenging cases to see things from the city’s point of view.”
According to Mull’s LinkedIn page, his areas of law included civil rights and open records requests under Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act.
David Frederick Mull was born June 3, 1976, in Redwood City, California, to Charles and Yvonne Mull. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where David grew up, developing a love for the outdoors, according to the obituary.
Mull earned a bachelor’s degree in government at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He then enrolled in the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, graduating in 2002. He worked as a clerk for Christine Durham, chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court.
In 2003, a year after graduating, while playing ultimate Frisbee, Mull met Keli Beard, then a law student at the U. The couple married in 2008. They had two sons: Atigun, born in 2009, and Parker, in 2011. Beard is a senior legal counsel for Utah’s Trust Lands Administration.
Mull launched his law career as a partner at Snow Christensen & Martineau. He then worked for five years as senior corporate counsel for the Utah Transit Authority and was a partner for 16 months at another Utah law firm, Magleby Cataxinos & Greenwood, before taking the job with the city.
Kittrell wrote that he has received several messages from attorneys around Utah “reaching out to let me know that they are also crushed by his loss. He truly left an impact, for the better, on those who knew him.”
Mull is survived by his wife, Keli Beard, their two sons and his sister, Christina Beckmann.
A celebration of life is scheduled for Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Garden Place at This Is the Place Heritage Park, 2601 Sunnyside Ave., Salt Lake City.