‘He’s my GOAT’: Friends and family remember Plympton father killed in last week’s nor’easter as ‘gentle giant’
Friends and family are mourning the death of Ryan MacDonald, a 36-year-old electrician from Plympton who died Friday after a pine tree fell on his red pickup truck during last week’s nor’easter.“Ryan was the strongest, toughest individual I’ve known,” MacDonald’s father, Bill MacDonald, said in an interview. “I honestly thought he was indestructible.” He remembered when his son had a hernia and refused to take time off from his demanding job so he could continue supporting his wife, Andreah MacDonald, and their kids, Avery and Tegan. Ryan MacDonald’s solution: taping over the hernia with duct tape.
Ryan MacDonald with wife Andreah MacDonald.
Bill MacDonald called his son a “gentle giant”—he said he was 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds. Friends, relatives, and coworkers knew MacDonald as a skilled man who would always help those close to him, whether it was wiring a house, jailbreaking an iPhone, or carrying a 7-foot couch out the door by himself.
“Anything you needed, he would drop what he was doing and help as best he could,” MacDonald’s father-in-law, Edward Brown, said. “Even if he had a sore back and a long day at work, he’d still have time to come over and give people a hand.”
Garrett Dunham, a close friend from IBEW Local 223, a union for electricians in Southeastern Massachusetts, admired MacDonald for his level head and sense of humor. Dunham said MacDonald would crack jokes and keep an upbeat attitude on the job, even on tougher jobs like the Bristol County House of Correction and Jail. He said MacDonald made it worth going to work.
“He was like the older brother that I never had,” Dunham said. “I looked up to him, loved hanging out with him, loved working together with him.”
Outside of work, MacDonald had varied interests ranging from Harleys to hockey to Halo.
“He’d be able to talk about how ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is clearly the best Star Wars movie,” MacDonald’s brother-in-law, Benjamin Brown, said. “He could ride his Harley with all the guys in the union and turn around and geek out about Zelda.”
MacDonald was a South Shore man his whole life—he was born in 1981 in Weymouth’s South Shore Hospital and raised in Pembroke and Plympton. He played hockey though his teens with his brother, Michael MacDonald, and he attended Silver Lake Regional High School, where he first started dating Andreah.
“You just knew they were probably going to end up together in the long run, and what they had was very special,” Benjamin Brown said.
Bill MacDonald called his son a “wild young kid.” MacDonald didn’t end up graduating from Silver Lake, and he was known to cause a bit of trouble with his Plympton pals.
“When I first met Ryan in high school, he was rocking a wife beater and his signature sideways hat as we peeled out of the parking lot in his Mustang blaring some angry nonsense,” childhood friend Joffrey Spaulding wrote in a private Facebook post.
After high school, MacDonald and Andreah parted ways—he worked odd jobs around the South Shore while she went to Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy. They rekindled their relationship during Andreah’s last year of school and soon married on the Plymouth waterfront in 2007. With daughter Avery, they moved to Las Vegas, where MacDonald started an apprenticeship program and worked on casinos and solar power fields in the desert.
Edward Brown said they packed everything up after a few years in Nevada and drove back to Massachusetts in 2010, showing up to the Brown family home as a surprise.
“It was like, ‘Holy smokes!’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re back!’” Edward Brown said.
They bounced from home to home around the South Shore, where their son Tegan was born. MacDonald finished his apprenticeship at IBEW Local 223 and became a journeyman. He started working full time for JM Electrical Company in 2016.
Ryan MacDonald with daughter Avery and son Tegan.
The MacDonalds purchased and settled into the historic Wright house in Plympton last summer, which relatives said was their dream home. They also celebrated their 10th anniversary and went skydiving with Andreah’s family that summer.
“Everywhere I went in the world I talked about my short tempered friend with questionable tattoos and piercings from my teenage years that matured into one of the most amazing fathers and people I have ever known,” Spaulding wrote in his post.
“He touched more hearts than people can imagine,” Michael MacDonald said. “He was an unbelievable, hardworking man.”
Andreah MacDonald and her children are receiving ongoing support from a GoFundMe fundraising page set up for the family. Over 1,000 people have chipped in over $100,000 in four days. MacDonald’s obituary was published in The Patriot Ledger on Wednesday.
“He’s the f[—]ing Tom Brady of a brother,” Michael MacDonald said. “He’s my GOAT.”
