Tony Randazzo remembers a great childhood with his stepbrother, Bryan MacFarlane, when Tony’s father married Bryan’s mother.
Bryan MacFarlane. Photo courtesy of Keri Brooks
They couldn’t communicate with words – Tony did not sign and Bryan did not read lips – but the 14-year-old and 9-year-old found other ways to have fun.
“We communicated by going on bike rides together through Baxter Woods and Evergreen Cemetery and a bunch of spots in Portland,” Randazzo said. “He actually taught me how to play Monopoly of all things. Even though I was a little older, I did not know how to play.”
After opening his Friday night radio show on WCLZ-FM with The Beatles’ “As My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the radio host launched into a five-hour tribute to Bryan. His family started a GoFundMe to help pay for burial costs and start a scholarship for a deaf student in Maine in Bryan’s name.
Bryan was at a cornhole tournament at Schemengees Bar & Grille when he and three members of his team, American Deaf Cornhole, were shot and killed Oct. 25, said his older sister, Keri Brooks, of Florida.
She started receiving condolence messages the next day from people all over the country who knew her brother, either from cornhole tournaments, tractor racing or the small, tight Deaf community with whom he loved to socialize.
Nine deaf people were playing cornhole at the weekly tournament, Brooks said. She knew two of her brother’s slain teammates, too. Like many of the community, they knew each other through the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf.
Brooks learned from her best friend, who lives in Maine, that her brother was likely dead. A few hours later, police showed up at her mother’s house and confirmed it, she said.
Bryan, 41, had only recently returned to Maine after stints in Vermont, Ohio and North Carolina. He wanted be near their mother, who lives in Lewiston. But they grew up in the greater Portland area, Brooks said.
He loved riding his motorcycle, camping, fishing, hanging out with deaf friends and his dog, M&M (named after his favorite candy), who regularly joined him in his travels as a commercial trucker, his sister said.
“His greatest life achievement is obtaining his Class D trucking license,” she said by text. “He was the first Deaf person to do so in Vermont, one of the very few Deaf people nationwide to obtain such a license.”
On her Facebook page, his sister thanked people for their support and said, “Life is too short. Hug your loved ones and say ILY as often as possible.”
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