Anyone who has driven on the north end of Vashon Highway in recent years is likely familiar with the roadside memorial to Patrick Byrd, who was killed in an accident there in 1999. But the heartbreaking “We miss you Daddy!” emblazoned on the white cross under his name will no longer be a tragic reminder of the incident, as the cross disappeared about two weeks ago.

While other roadside memorials have been taken down over time on Vashon, the missing cross came as a shock to Linda Peterson, an islander who lives nearby and has quietly but faithfully tended to Byrd’s memorial for the last 16 years.

“It’s just gone,” Peterson said last week. “It’s not lying anywhere nearby, and there is a perfect hole where it had been. It looks like it’s just been pulled straight out of the ground.”

Byrd was a musician from Puyallup who, along with his wife and a friend, came to Vashon on New Year’s Eve 1998 to play for the evening’s festivities at the golf club. On their way to the north-end ferry in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 1999, their van was rear ended by a drunk driver and sent off the highway and into a tree. Byrd died of his injuries, while his wife and their friend were also injured but survived. The Byrds had four children.

It has been presumed that someone in the Byrd family placed the cross at the site sometime during the year after the accident, though Byrd’s wife Wendy told The Beachcomber in 2001 that she could never

bring herself to visit it.

Soon after the cross’s appearance, Peterson, who didn’t know Byrd but lives across the highway from the memorial, began placing cut flowers there. She eventually started planting flowers beneath the cross and hauled her lawn mower across the highway regularly to keep the area around the cross from overgrowing. Every Christmas season, she and her husband  put a holiday decoration on it.

“I just couldn’t help thinking that someone needed to take care of Patrick,” Peterson said. “He was killed on the island, but he didn’t live here. … He didn’t have anyone here.”

Shortly before the accident, Peterson lost her sister to cancer. Her sister’s grave was in Oregon, so she couldn’t visit it often, something that she said fueled her desire to maintain Byrd’s cross.

“She was a flower arranger, so it just kind of came together that I was going to do this, both for Patrick and to help me work through losing my sister,” she said. “It was like a substitute.”

Peterson said she also felt that because the driver who caused the accident lived on Vashon, the memorial should serve as a  reminder of what he’d done.

“It was just so tragic, and it was an islander who caused it, so I thought we owed it to the family to never forget,” she said.

That islander never did forget the events of that night, and also recently noticed that the cross disappeared.

“It’s hard for me to talk about,” said Dan Hardwick, a local fisherman and the driver who hit Byrd’s van 16 years ago. “It was a very bad time in my life. I didn’t deal with things well.”

Hardwick was recently honored for his part in the heroic rescue of the crew of a capsized fishing vessel in Alaska in 2012. He was among five men to receive the prestigious Carnegie Hero award last December for the effort.

But 16 years ago, Hardwick explained, he’d just lost his girlfriend to cancer after caring for her through the illness for over a year. He began drinking to deal with his grief.

Hardwick was charged with vehicular homicide for the accident and spent almost three years in prison. He spoke sadly about the accident and the events surrounding it, and noted that while he made a point of not looking at the memorial every time he drove by, he was well aware of its presence and also of its recent disappearance.

“It was a horrible accident. I haven’t had a drop to drink since,” he said. “There is nothing I can do to change what happened. … There’s just nothing I can ever do.”

Whether the family decided it was time to take the memorial down or something else happened, Peterson’s tenure as its caretaker has left its mark. Last Friday, as she raked leaves around some potted plants by the hole left by the cross, Peterson said that she’s asked around about what might have happened, but to no avail. While there is some debate over maintaining roadside memorials, she said she’s invested so much in Byrd’s that she may replace it herself. She also plans to look into getting an official sign installed by King County that would warn against driving under the influence.

“It was so much a part of my routine for so long,” she said. “His name really became part of our family.”