Feature Story - Ethan Hatke

You’ve heard it from everyone in your life, your mom, your grandmother, a co-worker, even from Billy Joel, “Only the good die young”; Ethan Hatke was no exception. A young boy growing up in Hopewell Township, NJ to Eric and Theresa. According to his father, “Ethan was shy, but also enjoyed comradery and hanging out with a group of guys who he could trust.  He wasn’t the kind of person that he could walk up to you and then you became immediate best friends. With the exception of a couple kids when he was 5 or 6 which ended up becoming his group of best friends”.

Ethan was not an only child as he had a younger sister named, Emilianne who is six years younger and is so social that she had this idea that “she can just go up to the queen of England and she’ll be my friend”.  Even though he was the more shy older brother, he still felt like he had to protect his annoying little sister, but “he was a prankster, he used to play tricks on his sister all the time. We had a Yorkie that he used to chase around with a Nerf gun”. When Ethan went to High School, he wasn’t one of the jocks or one of the nerdy people, he was just a guy that had a close group of friends that would hang out with each other.

When Ethan wasn’t with his friends or caught up in schoolwork, he enjoyed swimming. As a smaller and skinny kid, swimming felt right for him and he enjoyed the comradery that being a part of a team. He not only swam competitively for Hopewell Valley Central High School, but also for a club swim team, the Eastern Express.  Ethan wasn’t the biggest, or the strongest, but what set Ethan apart was his leadership. As a supportive father, he saw that “when he was on the swim team, he was all about promoting the other swimmers. He would be out there shouting his lungs out because he enjoyed it when they did it for him and he just wanted to pay them back. To him that was all a part of the familial aspect of being on a team”. Ethan may not have been born a leader, but his mom says that “his leadership was due to his upbringing between boy scouts, the school district having an emphasis on leadership. Leadership was just engrained into the way he was raised, at home and in the community”.

Towards the end of his high school years, he wasn’t keen on being on the swim team in college, he wanted to pursue a career in engineering like his father who is a Design Engineer for the United States Navy.  At first glance, Ethan wanted to go to a small school and close to home, which mom was happy about. But when Ethan and his father took a visit to Virginia Tech, everything changed.

On December 29, 2015, Sophomore Ethan Hatke came back home and as many former swimmers do, Ethan went to a practice to swim with his former team, Easter Express. During that practice, Ethan collapsed and his father was called immediately. With paramedics operating the AED and his father helping with CPR, Ethan gave his last effort to fight for his life and in one breath, he was gone.

As you may have guessed, Ethan Hatke was an organ donor, to save and impact even more lives when he’s gone. Ethan and his father were taken to the hospital where some steps were taken to conserve his organs while his mother and sister were on their way to say goodbye.

During the autopsy of Ethan’s heart, they found out the sudden cause of his death, which was “Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy (ARVC) basically what that means is, the heart when its stressed, instead of building muscle, there’s a sequence missing in the DNA, so it builds fat instead, so instead of your heart getting stronger, it’s actually getting weaker”. The added issues associated with ARVC is that the fat doesn’t allow the electrical signals through the heart, which puts the heart into arrhythmia”

The legacy of Ethan J. Hatke is not only his life, but the Memorial Fund started in his name officially by his parents, Eric and Theresa. “The initial spearhead were his best friends; they started a GoFundMe page while we were busy getting the arrangements. They raised like $2,000 and I said I want to do something real with this, so we researched into starting a foundation. We wound up going with charitysmith.com which provides a 5013c umbrella and handles the tax work. We decided to start a scholarship at the high school that Ethan went to and to provide money into the research into ARVC”

In the beginning of the Ethan J. Hatke Memorial Fund, the community, had donors and a bunch of organizations and clubs holding fundraisers to raise money for the fund. As for the people that end up receiving the scholarship, it is one boy and one girl every year from Hopewell Valley Central High School and as Eric explains, “It’s not meant for the star captain of the football team or king of the prom. It’s for student who coaches can look to for leadership, helping others, and promote the team from within as well as maintain a good academic record at the same time”

As Billy Joel sang, “Only the good die young” and Ethan is a prime example of a great man who’s unfortunate passing  is a stepping stone to make himself one of the last to pass due to ARVC.