Tim O’Brien, award-winning broadcast journalist, dies at 77

Tim O’Brien, a broadcast journalist whose many accolades include contributing to award-winning CNN coverage, has died at the age of 77.

His son-in-law, Keith McGee, confirmed the news of his passing to CNN Business.

O’Brien died November 30 in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, after he was hit by a truck while waiting on his bicycle at a traffic light.

O’Brien had a long and impressive tenure in television news. In the late 1960s, he was a weekend anchor for WTOP in Washington. He later moved to New Orleans, where he co-anchored WDSU’s evening newscasts and then worked as a weekend anchor for WVUE. In 1977, after earning a law degree from Loyola University, he covered the Supreme Court for ABC News.

After more than 22 years at ABC News, O’Brien joined CNN where he won an Emmy for contributing to the network’s coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He worked as a Washington-based correspondent for CNN’s business program “Moneyline.” He was a contributing correspondent for PBS’ “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.”

In 2013, O’Brien and his ABC News colleague Martin Clancy published “Murder at the Supreme Court: Lethal Crime and Landmark Cases,” a book about the death penalty.

O’Brien taught law at Hofstra University in New York, St. Thomas University in Miami, Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale and at his alma mater Loyola University in New Orleans.

“He packed more in every day than anybody I know at his age, let alone people 20 years younger,” McGee said. “In the back of his head it was ingrained that he was going to be in touch with the people that he really cared about and parallel to that he was active and going on these amazing bike tours.”

For his alma mater Woodward Academy, O’Brien reflected on his career, humbly writing, “Luck can be a huge factor in achieving success, as it was in mine. For example: The timing of my law degree and subsequent application to ABC News was a total shot in the dark, but — as luck would have it — a bulls-eye. But that’s still not it. The real luck in my life was in the choice of my spouse.”

O’Brien is survived by that spouse, his wife of 49 years Guadalupe “Petie” Moreno O’Brien, his two children, a twin brother, his sister and five grandchildren.