Story Published:
Jun 22, 2005 at 7:11 AM PDT
Story Updated:
Aug 31, 2006 at 1:58 AM PDT
TACOMA - A man who was mutilated at age 7 in an
attack that was instrumental in adoption of the nation's first law
for indefinite confinement of sexual predators has died in a
motorcycle wreck.
Ryan Alan Hade, partial to daredevil sports and especially fond
of his grandmother, died June 9 when his recently purchased yellow
Suzuki motorcycle collided with a pickup truck near Yelm, friends,
relatives and law enforcement officials confirmed.
Hade was known to relatively few as the victim of a grisly
attack in 1989 that made national headlines. A convicted sex
offender, Earl Kenneth Shriner, was sentenced the next year to 131
years in prison for ambushing and raping him, cutting off his
penis, stabbing him and leaving him for dead in a Tacoma park.
Legislators cited the case in adopting the nation's first state
law to allow indefinite civil confinement of sexual predators,
noting that Shriner had a 25-year history of perversion and
violence against young people.
Now 55, Shriner remains in prison.
Hade underwent reconstructive surgery and was in counseling
through age 13. When middle school classmates began asking whether
he was the boy who had been attacked by Shriner, he switched to New
Horizon School in Renton to get more attention for dyslexia and
attention deficit disorder.
He completed the ninth grade while living with his father,
Lowell Hade, in Roseburg, Ore., then returned to Tacoma, later
enrolling at Bates Technical College to learn upholstery.
Hade left home at age 18, became interested in real estate
investing and bought, renovated and sold one home in Tacoma and
another in Spanaway.
His mother, Helen Harlow, said Hade supported himself with such
work, upholstery jobs and a monthly stipend from a trust fund she
formed with donations from the public that at one point reached
nearly $1 million.
At the time of his death he was living in a mobile home on seven
acres in Roy and looking for a one-story duplex in Tacoma for
himself and his grandmother, Betty Foote of University Place. She
said he wanted to spare her knees the strain of going up and down
stairs in her current home.
Hade remembered few details of the attack and rarely talked
about it, but until two or three years ago he would become tense,
irritable and physically ill each year around the anniversary of
the harrowing episode, friends and relatives said.
"It's like he just put it out of his mind. He just felt
comfortable with that fellow put away," Foote said.
Hade enjoyed skateboarding, snowboarding and skydiving, recently
got a flying lesson from a cousin while visiting Illinois and not
long ago bought a 1979 Pontiac Trans-Am to overhaul, calling it a
"chick magnet," Harlow said.
"He survived something that was extreme and consequently he
lived his life extreme," Harlow said. "You cheat death once, you
figure you can cheat it just about any time you want."
"He always talked how life was short, you've got to make every
day count," said Chris Kunkel, who considered Hade his best
friend. "That's really what he did, make every day count...
"He worked every day to make sure his life had meaning."