He got one scene. One episode. One credit on one of television’s most beloved crime dramas. And somehow, nearly a decade later, people are still looking him up.
That’s the story of Randy Dee Hafen a young man from the dusty back roads of southern Utah who loved wrecked cars, wide-open spaces, and living at full volume. He wasn’t chasing fame for its own sake. He was just being exactly who he was. And then, on a cold January evening in 2017, the road took him.
What followed was something Hollywood rarely gives to an uncredited background actor: a televised memorial that moved strangers in living rooms across the world to tears. This is his story, told fully and without pretense.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Randy Dee Hafen |
| Date of Birth | July 20, 1988 |
| Birthplace | St. George, Utah, USA |
| Raised In | Ivins, Utah |
| Zodiac Sign | Cancer |
| High School | Cedar City High School |
| Date of Death | January 2, 2017 |
| Age at Passing | 28 years old |
| Cause of Death | Automobile accident, Enterprise, Utah |
| Parents | Gary & Marie Hafen / Joseph Hardy |
| Son | Justin Slama |
| Siblings | 3 sisters (Eva Marie, Martha Rose, Darci Ann); half-brother Garrick Hafen; half-sisters Janice Blanchard & Tracy Hovater |
| Known For | Role as Demolition Derby Driver in Bones Season 12, Episode 9 |
| Episode Title | “The Steal in the Wheels” — aired March 7, 2017 |
| Episode Director | Robert Reed Altman |
| Passions | Demolition derbies, car and truck building, adventure |
| Social Media Presence | Limited; memorialized posthumously online |
| Legacy | In-memoriam card on Bones; “Remembering Randy Dee Hafen” Facebook page (399+ followers) |
Born in the Desert, Built for Speed
Did you know that the place where Randy Dee Hafen grew up doesn’t appear on most tourist maps of Utah?
Ivins is a small community tucked into the red rock landscape just outside St. George, a town better known for its proximity to Zion National Park than for producing Hollywood talent. Randy was born in St. George on July 20, 1988, to Gary and Marie Hafen a family rooted deep in that corner of the American Southwest where the sky goes on forever and Friday nights mean something that doesn’t involve a streaming service.
He was raised with three sisters Eva Marie, Martha Rose, and Darci Ann along with a half-brother named Garrick and two half-sisters, Janice and Tracy, scattered across Nevada and Utah. For a kid from that region, growing up wasn’t defined by ambition toward the entertainment industry. It was defined by the land, the community, and whatever you could build with your hands.
Randy went to Cedar City High School, which sits about an hour north of Ivins. He graduated without any particular fanfare — no drama club headlines, no student film credits. What he carried out of those years wasn’t a résumé. It was a set of obsessions: demolition derbies, car mechanics, adventure, and the kind of friendship that forms when two people spend a weekend underneath an engine together.
The Man Behind the Wheel
Here’s what most write-ups get wrong about Randy Dee Hafen: they treat his passion for demolition derbies like a quirky hobby. It wasn’t. It was a lifestyle.
Demolition derby is a motorsport with a deceptively simple premise drivers intentionally crash into each other inside an enclosed arena until one vehicle is left functional. It requires mechanical knowledge, physical toughness, genuine fearlessness, and the ability to read a chaotic situation in real time. Randy didn’t just watch these events. He participated in them. He built cars for them alongside his friends. He understood the craft of controlled destruction in a way that only comes from years of hands-on devotion.
This matters enormously in understanding how he ended up on television. When the casting team for Bones needed someone to authentically fill the role of a demolition derby driver, they didn’t need an actor pretending. They needed somebody who actually belonged in that arena. Randy Dee Hafen belonged.
Beyond the derbies, people who knew him consistently describe a man who was impossible to say no to not because he was pushy, but because his energy was genuinely magnetic. He was always up for something. A road trip with no destination. Helping someone fix a transmission at 11 PM. An adventure that had absolutely no plan attached to it. That quality that full-throttle embrace of whatever was next is the thread that runs through every remembrance left on his memorial page and guestbook.
One Shot at Hollywood — and He Nailed It
The story of how Randy Dee Hafen ended up on Bones reads like something out of a script itself. In 2016, while the show was filming its twelfth and final season, Randy auditioned for a role in an episode built entirely around a world he already knew inside out. The episode, “The Steal in the Wheels,” placed lead characters Booth and Brennan undercover inside a demolition derby circuit to investigate a murder. The production needed drivers who could make the action feel real not staged, not sanitized, but genuinely charged with the kinetic energy of the sport.
Randy got the part. It was uncredited. The character had no name in the script. None of that mattered. He flew to Los Angeles, walked onto the set at 20th Century Fox Studios, and did what he always did he was exactly, completely himself. People on set noticed. That authenticity, that comfort inside the chaos of crushed metal and roaring engines, was impossible to fake.
The episode was filmed in the latter half of 2016. Randy went home to Utah. And on January 2, 2017, at 6:18 in the evening, he died in a car crash near Enterprise, Utah. He was twenty-eight years old.
The episode he’d filmed hadn’t aired yet. It wouldn’t air until March 7, 2017 two months after his death.
The Night a TV Screen Became a Memorial
When “The Steal in the Wheels” finally aired, viewers who tuned in for a standard crime procedural got something else entirely at the end of the episode.
The closing credits carried a card that read: “In memory of our good friend Randy Dee Hafen July 20, 1988 January 2, 2017.”
Notice the word: friend. Not “colleague.” Not “cast member.” Not any of the corporate, distancing language that entertainment tributes usually default to. The crew at Bones called him their friend because that’s what he was.
For hundreds of thousands of viewers who had never heard the name Randy Dee Hafen, that card was a doorway. They paused. They searched. They found the obituary, the guestbook, the Facebook memorial page. And they left messages that still sit there today from Texas, from the UK, from corners of the world Randy never visited from strangers who felt the weight of a life cut off too early.
Did you know that an uncredited, unnamed background role in one episode of a network drama could generate an international outpouring of grief from people who never met the person? Randy Dee Hafen is proof that it can.
The Family He Left Behind
The most grounding part of Randy’s story the detail that strips away any romanticism and replaces it with something real is his son.
Justin Slama. Randy’s boy. The person for whom his father was more than a memory on a television screen.
Randy became a father while still a young man himself, and by all accounts, that identity mattered to him enormously. The obituary his family wrote doesn’t lead with the Bones credit. It leads with who he was to the people who knew him first and most deeply: a son, a brother, a father, a friend who would drop everything to help someone out.
His parents Gary and Marie Hafen, alongside Joseph Hardy survived him. His three sisters survived him. His extended family survived him. And Justin Slama, his son, grows up with a father who left one small, permanent mark on American pop culture in a role that fit him as naturally as the sport that shaped his life.
Social Media and Public Legacy
Randy Dee Hafen didn’t have a managed social media presence. He wasn’t building a brand or curating an image for an algorithm. He was just living and occasionally, those moments found their way online in the organic, unfiltered way that people shared things before social media became a performance.
After his death, a Facebook page titled “Remembering Randy Dee Hafen” was created by people who loved him. It has accumulated over 399 followers not because of viral marketing, but because individuals kept finding his name through Bones reruns and kept looking for a place to say something. That page became the digital gathering point for a community of grievers that spans his actual hometown and the unexpectedly wide orbit of people touched by his story.
On Reddit’s Bones community, his name surfaces periodically. On social platforms, fans who discover the episode for the first time still post about the memorial card often with the same surprised, moved reaction that viewers had when it first aired. His IMDb page, sparse as it is, receives steady traffic from people piecing together who he was.
The public image that has formed around Randy posthumously is a remarkably faithful one. He isn’t mythologized beyond recognition. He’s remembered as precisely what he was: someone from a small corner of Utah who loved loud, metal-on-metal motorsport, who got one chance in front of a camera, and who died far too young.
FAQs
1. Who was Randy Dee Hafen?
A young man from Ivins, Utah, who worked as an actor and demolition derby enthusiast. He is best remembered for his uncredited role in Bones Season 12, Episode 9, filmed in 2016 and aired posthumously in March 2017.
2. When and where was he born?
He was born on July 20, 1988, in St. George, Utah.
3. How did Randy Dee Hafen die?
He died in an automobile accident in Enterprise, Utah, on the evening of January 2, 2017. He was 28 years old.
4. What was his role in Bones?
He played an uncredited Demolition Derby Driver in “The Steal in the Wheels,” the ninth episode of Bones’ final twelfth season, directed by Robert Reed Altman.
5. Did the episode air before or after his death?
After. He died on January 2, 2017. The episode aired on March 7, 2017 — a full two months later. His performance was already captured and locked in, but he never got to see himself on screen.
6. What did the Bones tribute card say?
The closing credits read: “In memory of our good friend Randy Dee Hafen — July 20, 1988 – January 2, 2017.” The use of “friend” rather than any formal title was widely noted by fans.
7. Did Randy have any other acting credits?
His known acting career consists of this single Bones appearance. He was just beginning to explore that path.
8. Was demolition derby just a hobby for him?
It was far more than that. He built cars for the sport, competed in derbies, and had genuine expertise in the mechanical side of the craft. The Bones role didn’t introduce him to that world — he was already deep inside it.
9. Did Randy have children?
Yes. He is survived by a son named Justin Slama.
10. Who were his parents?
Gary and Marie Hafen, along with Joseph Hardy. He grew up with this blended family in Ivins, Utah.
Final Words
Randy Dee Hafen didn’t get a long career. He didn’t get a second audition or a bigger role or the chance to see his name in lights. What he got was one perfectly matched moment, a casting call for a demolition derby driver, answered by someone who had spent years becoming exactly that and a tribute from a group of people who genuinely mourned him when he was gone.
For the strangers who found his story through a credit card at the end of an episode: what you felt was real. A full human life compressed into a single television footnote, radiating outward.
He was twenty-eight years old. He had a son. He had sisters and parents who loved him. He had a garage full of projects and a trunk full of plans for the next adventure. And for forty-four minutes, on a Fox crime drama set in a demolition derby, he was exactly, completely, wonderfully himself.
