Jimi Lott, Seattle Times Photographer, Dead at 52, Ruled Suicide

By: SEATTLE (AP) ? James G. "Jimi" Lott, a Seattle Times photographer who took pictures for a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series and won numerous state and regional awards, is dead at 52.

Lott, employed at The Times from 1984 to 2004 and known as much for compassion as for a sharp eye, was found dead Tuesday evening in a Wenatchee motel room. Chelan County Coroner Dr. Gina M. Fino ruled that he had committed suicide.

Born in Pontiac, Mich., and reared in San Diego, Lott won the Reid Blackburn Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in feature photography, part of the annual Associated Press Northwest Photography Contest, for four consecutive years, 1985-88.

He won the 1989 Cowles Cup, also part of the AP competition, for work that accompanied a mental health series, and he was photographer on a team whose coverage of rudder safety problems on Boeing's 737 jetliners won The Times a Pulitzer in 1997.

Lott won 18 awards in the Pacific Northwest Excellence in Journalism Contest of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi; 10 awards in the annual AP contest, and first place in the feature category in a state photojournalism contest for high school sports in 1992.

He also won several honors in the 45th annual Pictures of the Year competition at the University of Missouri in 1988, including first place in the news picture story category for photographs in a special section on the homeless.

Before coming to The Times, Lott was a Pulitzer finalist in spot-news photography in 1984 while working for The Spokesman-Review of Spokane. He previously worked at The World and the Bay Reporter newspapers in Coos Bay, Ore.; as director of photography at the Skagit Valley Herald in Mount Vernon and in a similar post at the Yakima Herald-Republic.
He left The Times last year to pursue work in photo illustration.

Survivors include a son, Joshua Lott, and former wife, Kathleen Lott, both of Shoreline, and stepfather Walter Hoskinson of Wenatchee. No public memorial has been planned.