Matt Herron still struggles to understand what happened on the night of October 12, 2012, when his close friend Ryan Poston was killed. “I think about him every day,” Herron said. “You don’t think something like this would happen to someone you know.”
“Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening? I know a lot of people in his life have to feel the same way,” Herron told “48 Hours” reporter Peter Van Sant. How did things get so out of hand between Ryan and his girlfriend Shayna Hubers that she shot him – insisting it was to protect herself?
“What was lost when your friend was shot?” Van Sant asked Herron. “He’s the kind of guy you want in your life,” he replied. “Not just a friend, but a loving son, a protective, adoring older brother.”
“He has three younger sisters that he admires very much,” Herron continued. Ryan’s family was close, although his parents divorced when he was very young. He was very close to his father, Jay Poston. When his mother remarried Peter Carter, Ryan considered him a second father.
“He had two men who loved him like sons,” Herron explained. “He wanted to express the big role these two guys played in his life…so he legally changed his middle name to Carter. He’s very proud of that.”
“What does he want to do, what do you see him doing in the next few years?” Van Sant asked.
“You know, I used to joke that I would run his first political campaign for him for free,” Herron said with a laugh.
Shayna’s future also seems promising, said Sarah Robinson, who grew up with Shayna Hubers in Lexington, Kentucky.
“How smart is she?” Van Sant asked.
Robinson replied, “I think she’s almost a genius, in my opinion. I mean, she’s always in AP classes, always getting A’s in everything.”
Shayna has received numerous awards for academic excellence and leadership.
“She likes to be successful in whatever she does,” Robinson said.
In high school, Shayna also had a real talent for drama when it came to boys, Robinson said.
“If a guy, like, breaks up with her or something, or if a guy just says they’re not interested in her, she’s going to have a hard time taking it,” she explained. “…crying and maybe a little screaming…she really doesn’t like letting go.”
This is the Shayna side that Ryan will know very well. Shanna went to school in Lexington, more than 80 miles from Ryan’s apartment in Highland Heights. If it weren’t for Facebook, the two might never have met. He found her flirtatious photos, and they started dating in the spring of 2011. He is 28 and a lawyer; she is 19 and a college student.
When asked if Shanna was happy, Robinson told Van Sant, “Well, yes, she seems happy. I mean, she never said anything about the relationship.”
But according to Ryan’s friend Allie Wagner, there were a lot of mistakes from the start.
“What was Shanna’s reaction when she first saw you?” Van Sant asked.
“She’s so cold. You can tell right away…she’s just obsessed with him,” Wagner replied. “I think her goal at the beginning was to settle him and her. When she didn’t make it, that became a problem.”
“He was very busy with work … he wasn’t really looking for anyone,” Herron said. “He tried a few times to end things.”
But Ryan had a hard time getting Shanna to let go. Shayna admitted in a text message to a friend: “He said he was only with me because I made him feel bad when I cried.”
“He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Unfortunately, she just refused to accept the no,” Herron said.
“When she was in town, she would come to his place,” Herron told Van Sant’s surprise visit.
As Shayna becomes more possessive, so does Ryan’s anger and concern. In a text message to his cousin, he wrote: “This has reached insane restraining order levels… She showed up to my flat 3 times and refused to leave each time.”
He also complained about Shayna’s compulsive behavior in a Facebook message to Wagner:
“‘Literally, this is probably the craziest f-king I’ve ever seen. She almost scared me,'” Wagner read aloud.
“I wish I had said, ‘If she scares you or she goes crazy, go away,'” Wagner said.
Instead, he kept taking her back.
“I think he was playing mind games with her,” said Ryan’s neighbor, Nicky Kearns.
Kearns claims there is another side to this turbulent relationship. Shayna complained to her that Ryan was emotionally abusive.
“She always told me he would say she needed a breast augmentation or facelift and she was fat; she needed to lose weight,” she said.
“Why didn’t she leave?” Van Sant asked.
“I guess because she’s young and she always tells me she loves him,” Kearns replied. “She did his laundry, she did his laundry, she took his dog out, she went to buy him food. She did everything for him.”
“Could there be a Ryan you don’t know? Someone with a dark side?” Van Sant asked Wagner.
“No,” she replied. “Never raised his voice in the 10 years I’ve known him…he’s always been the same; super nerdy, super sweet.”
Ryan hoped that Shayna finally got word when he told her that he would not see her that weekend, October 12, 2012. What he didn’t tell her was that he was dating world-class beauty Audrey Bolte, Miss Ohio USA 2012, whom he also met on Facebook. But he did tell Wagner, himself a former beauty contestant, that he knew Bolt.
“She’s very pretty…very personable and all that stuff, so Ryan was the perfect match for her,” Wagner said. “He’s really excited to go.”
That Friday night, Ryan and Miss Ohio were supposed to meet at a bar. But Shayna showed up at his apartment and Ryan never made it.
