Deer Park Remembers Teen Who Loved To Play Basketball

Ryan Hill was a fixture on the Deer Park basketball courts, his baggy blue shorts, quick smile and smooth jump shot well known in the community.

More than 300 people crowded into the Deer Park High School gym Sunday to mourn Hill’s death. Hill, 15, was struck by lightning while walking home from school April 16.

He was remembered as a rising star in the Deer Park basketball program, a gym rat who had to be kicked out of the gym well after practice ended.

A pair of leather basketballs and a “Snake River Shootout” trophy won two days before he died flanked his casket, which was placed beneath a basketball hoop.

“This is where he loved to be,” said Jessie Klassing, Hill’s coach on the ninth-grade basketball team.

The lightning bolt struck Hill on the head, missing a satellite dish and metal fence a few feet away, and exited through his ankle.

Hill was a charismatic youth with a buzz cut and smiling, half-moon eyes, and his death stunned the community. Sunday, his friends and family struggled to find closure to a life that seemed “a rosebud waiting to open.”

“Like Mary was chosen to bear Jesus, I was chosen to bear you,” his mother, Jackie Cardle, said in a good-bye letter to her son. Her husband, Milton, read the letter.

“I knew you were special the first time I felt your tender fluttering inside my womb.”

With more than 100 of Hill’s classmates dabbing their eyes in the bleachers, ninth-graders Jamie Nadherny and Gina Bendowsky said Hill was a kind-hearted boy who pledged to be their “best friend forever” on the back of an eraser.

“I’ll love you forever,” said Bendowsky.

The people of Deer Park remembered Hill, an honor student and freshman representative to the homecoming court, as an intelligent and popular boy.

“He was the kid everyone wanted to copy,” said Deer Park Middle School teacher Roberta Cossey.

Basketball was the consistent thread that wove through Hill’s life.

The star of the ninth-grade team last season, he had the second highest season point total that Klassing could remember.

“Wherever there was a basketball, he was there,” said Klassing.

Hill’s death is the latest in a string of tragedies in the north part of the county. Seven Deer Park students or recent graduates have died in the past year, said high school secretary Linda Davis.

Four students were killed in July in a car accident.

“Our grieving today is not only for this one,” the Rev. Richard Holmes told the crowd at Hill’s funeral. “Grief can pile up.”

As the crowd sobbed, Milton Cardle finished his wife’s letter:

“How special an angel you must be to be chosen to be with the Lord at such a tender age. … What I wouldn’t give to hold your head, stroke your hair, hold you in my arms and tell you one more time how much I love you before you go.”

, DataTimes