Timothy Cook; Advocate for Disabled

Timothy Cook, who spent most of his life as an advocate for the disabled, died Tuesday in a Washington hospital of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Cook, an attorney and executive director of the National Disability Action Center, was 38 and had been crippled since childhood by fused knee joints that resulted from an illness.

Cook founded the Washington-based center in 1988 after serving as a staff lawyer in the civil rights division of the Justice Department during the first four years of the Reagan Administration. There, he was a frequent critic of the division’s handling of cases involving the rights of the handicapped.

In 1983, he wrote Atty. Gen. William French Smith, charging that his boss, Assistant Atty. Gen. William Bradford Reynolds, was working in opposition to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Reynolds claimed that Cook was misrepresenting his position. Cook resigned later that year.

More recently, Cook argued successfully that a blind person was entitled to a position in the Foreign Office of the State Department and, in a case involving the Long Island Railroad in New York, that the disabled are entitled to access to commuter rail stations.

Cook also had worked for the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia and the Western Law Center for the Handicapped in Los Angeles.

Survivors include his wife, Geraldine, a son, his parents, two brothers, four sisters and his maternal grandmother.