After beating, Maplewood woman gets back in saddle

The first thing you'll notice about Tracy Hacker is she's doing quite well.

There's the tracheotomy scar, of course, but that's a small thing, really, just something she's learning to live with. Same with the short hair and the scars on her scalp, she says, which she'll notice when she showers. The hair will grow back, she said.

No, Tracy Hacker couldn't be happier -- or stronger.

A year ago, Hacker, then 27, lay in the back yard of her Maplewood home, the side of her head crushed, a victim of a baseball-bat beating so severe police would summon the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to process a crime scene they believed could be a homicide.

"Is she breathing?" a police dispatcher had asked a witness who had called about the crime on that beautiful late afternoon of Oct. 6, 2006.

"She's breathing," the witness said. "There is blood and noises."

Although police would put more than 1,000 hours into the case, nobody has been arrested or charged.

Said Hacker, "Everything happens for a reason."

Now, she is looking forward to finding out just what that reason is.

'A horseback rider'

Before the night of Oct. 6, 2006, Hacker said, she had enjoyed life in the 1900 block of Dieter Street. With her dog, Fen, she would walk around nearby Wakefield Lake, and she would roller-blade and bike around it, too.

That October day had been unseasonably warm and sunny, she recalls. She'd been on the garage roof, measuring it for work that needed to be done, then climbed down. She has no recollection of the attack.

She credits her subsequent recovery to her experiences as a horseback rider. For five years, she said, she has been riding at Windy Ridge Ranch in Woodbury, where she is part of an equestrian drill team: "Like synchronized horseback riding," she said.

You can gain a lot of confidence, Hacker said, when you ask a "huge animal to do something you've never done before" and then you see it happen. So, when re-learning how to walk or tackle other skills, she would use that confidence, she said, and "just go," prompting others to express amazement.

"I would just look at them and say, 'I'm a horseback rider,'" Hacker said.

This fall, as anniversary dates of the attack and her hospitalization have passed by, Hacker says that she had a particularly rough time in October. After all, she lost almost all of October 2006 to the coma. On Oct. 27, the anniversary of the day she awoke, her boyfriend threw her a Halloween/wake-up party.

"I made a toast to everyone to celebrate life to its fullest," she said.

In the saddle, again

As a result of the attack, Hacker has lost about 80 percent of the hearing in her right ear, and she tires easily. But she works 35 hours a week in a new job -- she's a staffing coordinator at Team Personnel Services in St. Paul -- and plans to go back to college.

She hopes that by acquiring a master's degree in social work, she will learn why she's still here -- why she was destined to survive.

After all, she says, everything happens for a reason.

That is the kind of talk that can make her mother angry. No one should've had to endure what she's had to endure, Lari Hacker will tell her. But for Tracy Hacker, it is just another challenge: "I better make some good of this," she said.

"It came back pretty quickly," Hacker said of the riding skills.

And what of the unfinished business of the investigation?

Her family is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a suspect. Would Hacker be hurt, she was asked, if there never were charges?

"I am grateful," she said, "because it's given me an entirely new perspective on life. The relationships that I have. The fact that I'm alive.

"There are always cases that go unsolved. Murders. And I'm still here. Life is good."