He was 19. A Texas Tech student who joined a fraternity last autumn and, by every account from the people who actually knew him, was the sort of person who made a room better just by walking into it. Ryder Harrington didn't make it home from a night out in Austin on Sunday. A gunman opened fire outside Buford's Bar on West Sixth Street at around 2 am on 1 March 2026, killing two people and wounding 14 others. Harrington was one of them.
Since the incident, the tributes have been relentless—his fraternity, his siblings, a Texas House Speaker, strangers on the internet who never met him but donated anyway. A GoFundMe set up in his name raised more than $41,000 (approximately £30,400) in a matter of hours. None of it, of course, brings him back.
