Some people in Toledo, and in greater northwest Ohio, are just too big for a single newspaper column. Their stories are too multifaceted and rich. They are worthy of book-length treatments. I am talking about people such as Baldemar Velasquez, and Bobby Kaplan, and Sister Jane Mary Sorosiak. I can’t write a book on each one. But I can come back to them in future columns — like recurring characters in a Dickens serial.

Tom Murray is another one of these characters. I promise to come back to him.

Mr. Murray lives in Huron and practices law in Sandusky. He has done so for over 40 years. But that tells you almost nothing about the man.

I was introduced to Tom Murray by Father Jim Bacik, himself a person who should be the central character in a novel by J.F. Powers or Muriel Spark — a man who somehow managed to found and build a parish while attaining an Oxford PhD and functioning as a theologian. A man who follows baseball with almost the same fervor as the pronouncements of Pope Francis and golfs as well as he preaches.

Father Bacik told me that I had to meet his friend Tom Murray, whom he has known most of that same 40 years. They met when he heard Mr. Murray give a speech against the Vietnam War, perhaps as early as 1966. He told me: “The man is a genius and his wife [Ann] is a saint.” He said Mr. Murray frequently calls him on Saturdays with the following salutation: “So what are we doing to save the world?”

Mr. Murray surely is a force of nature. His question to Father Bacik is in no way meant to be ironic. In his view, it is the question Christians are charged with asking every day of their lives. “Service is the only thing that endures,” he told me. “Deus caritas est.”

Tom Murray is a voluble Irish Catholic who ran twice for Congress and is darn glad he lost. “Terrible job,” he says, “just terrible.” Even before Congress effectively nullified itself. He has three great passions in his life: his family, the Catholic Church, and Russia.

Yes, Russia. And all things Russian.

He got interested because of the arms race, way back in the 1970s. He’d always been moved by Russian literature. He wanted to go to Russia and see for himself: What are these “enemies” like? He went. He decided to learn the language so he could really get to know Russia. Then he decided to rent a car and travel to the outer regions, far from Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). He fell in love with the place. He went back to Russia 30 more times.

Even more unlikely, he got to know Mikhail Gorbachev and his inner circle. Mr. Murray put on a major international conference on freedom of religion in Moscow, sanctioned by the Russian government. Mr. Gorbachev remains a close personal friend today. And Mr. Murray has even brought him to northeast Ohio to speak.

Perhaps most astonishingly, Mr. Murray built a women’s and children’s hospital in Russia — roughly 30 miles from Moscow. It bothered him that the state of obstetrics was utterly primitive in Russia. “Women were treated like cattle,” and abortion on demand was common. Mr. Murray wanted to create a new model in which women would be taught how to care for themselves and their children. And he knew that his own inherent revulsion at mass abortion could dovetail with the Russian need to boost birth rates, which were terribly low. Today, the Thomas and Ann Murray Maternity Clinic in Balashikha stands as the flagship of a new health-care standard in Russia. It was partially built with USAID funds and help from Rotary International — but also with the bulk of the Murrays’ life savings.

Tom Murray’s other great passion is his work — not just the law but the thing he has specialized in for most of the last 20 years: sudden-acceleration cases.

Mr. Murray may be the leading lawyer in the nation in this area. He and his associate, Molly O'Neill, have prepared, tried, and won more cases than anyone out there. And he has now written a book, which may be destined to become as famous as Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, called Deadly By Design. In it he details the scores of people who have been killed and injured by runaway cars. He thinks it could be as many as 100,000 accidents.

The basic problem is that cars are no longer mechanical but electronic, and your gas pedal is not connected to a throttle, but a mini-conductor and ultimately a computer. And these things fail. Moreover, the car companies, says Mr. Murray, have known it all along.

Mr. Murray’s book, which reads like a who-done-it, makes it impossible to believe that scores and scores of accidents resulting from runaway cars have been caused by driver error. For one thing, a great number of them were with cops and highway patrolmen — not your stereotype of the absent-minded driver. All the car companies are guilty, Mr. Murray says. Toyota and, I am sorry to say, Ford, are among the worst offenders. I am sorry to say it because this city needs American automobiles to be great and to sell. And I am sorry to say it, also, because my father loved Fords and Lincolns and I proudly became a Ford stockholder when Detroit was declared dead six years ago.

But I believe Mr. Murray. His evidence in this book, of Ford’s problems with its cruise-control system for example, is voluminous. Mr. Murray thinks technology simply got ahead of management and ethics — the car companies had to get the latest thing out there, even if they didn’t really know how to make it safe. Clarence Ditlow, Mr. Nader’s and once the government’s top auto safety expert, calls the notion that all sudden acceleration is driver’s error a “myth.” The sheer numbers alone make it unlikely to be anything but myth.

Ford and Toyota have already made notable settlements, and the Ford case was Mr. Murray’s. And there are more major cases to come. Mr. Murray wants justice for victims, a car buyer’s bill of rights, and an effective sudden acceleration fail-safe. He has a small staff but does not mind taking on the entire auto industry from Sandusky. On Sundays, he goes to Mass and follows along in Russian. He says the Mass is more deeply spiritual in the Russian language. He’s not chasing ambulances. He believes he is engaged in service — the only thing that lasts.

Keith C. Burris is a columnist for The Blade.

Contact him at: kburris@theblade.com or 419-724-6266.

First Published September 14, 2014, 4:00 a.m.