Victim of 1989 rape and mutilation dies in motorcycle crash

06:07 PM PDT on Wednesday, June 22, 2005

From KING 5 Staff and Wire Reports

TACOMA, Wash. - A man who at the age of 7 was mutilated in an attack that instrumental in driving the adoption of the nation's first law for indefinite confinement law 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. He was riding his bike in woods near his home when Earl Shriner offered him a doughnut. Once lured out of sight, Shriner proceeded to rape, stab, and strangle him. He also severed his penis.

It turned out Shriner had a lengthy criminal history that included previous sex offenses against children and even a murder.

Shriner, now 55, was sentenced the next year to 131 years in prison for the crime.

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.

KING

Ryan Hade is said to have 'lived his life extreme.'

The crime spurred Hade's mother, Helen Harlow, to create the Tennis Shoe Brigade, an organization that pushed legislators to pass several laws that ultimately lengthened sexual predators sentences, made tracking after their release mandatory, and requires police to notify communities when sexual predators move in.

Hade's life

His family said in a matter of weeks after the attack, Hade was up and about, even attending his cousin Rachael's wedding a month-and-a-half later.

"When he was at my wedding, he still had rope burns on his neck and just was normal, jumping around, being a normal child. never said anything to me ever about it," she said.

Doctors eventually performed reconstructive surgery.

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.

But his grandmother, Betty Foote, said that when she asked him if the kids bothered him at school, he responded: “I think I have more friends now because of what happened than I did before."

Hade 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.

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. Foote said he wanted to spare her knees the strain of going up and down stairs in her current home.

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."

His family believes he survived his childhood attack for a reason.

"There was something that Ryan hadn't finished that he needed to do,” Rachael said. “And I think a lot of it is he survived something. And to show people that you can survive after something like that happens."

"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."