Jared was born to William and Maureen Harrison in April 1948, one of 7 boys born to the couple. They lived in upstate New York where Bill Harrison worked for a steel company after WWII and Maureen was a nurse, also a veteran. The rough group of boys lived your average 1950s life, fishing and lighting off cherry bombs, doing all the dumb things kids did in those days. Generally speaking, all reasonably good kids. Several of the boys wound up in the steel company with their father. Jared himself was extremely smart and motivated to get OUT of the blue-collar business that his father worked, not because he was ashamed but just because he had some ambition. He managed a scholarship to Columbia University in 1966.
The Vietnam War changed the course of his plans. He enlisted in the Navy in 1968, before the draft was enacted, and deferred the rest of his scholarship until his term of service ended.
In 1973, he returned to New York and his university work with a new maturity. Carina Barbieri was working as a waitress and singer near the university, struggling with a contract law class and he spots her working on her homework with a frown. She's beautiful and he offers to help her with it. In early 1975, they marry and their daughter is born 7 months later. Although it is intensely difficult, both of them manage to finish at Columbia Law. Carina Harrison goes into real estate law while Jared does some work initially for a firm that does both civil and criminal law, but ultimately he decides he doesn't want to defend the scumbags that his firm was taking on. So he switched firms and stuck strictly to contract law.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Jared Harrison made a solid name for himself, eventually opening up his own firm (very small, but took a number of big-name clients with him). He spent nearly 30 years dealing with all the movers and shakers in the building industry of New York — it's something of an inbred little community there — *and* managed to keep his client list to those who were not mob-related. Something of a feat during this era.
In 2004, he became aware that there was something unique about his daughter. But Elisabeth wouldn't talk about it. He left it alone until 2006, when he lost his wife in the Bomb in Midtown. He retired after that, needing the space to grieve. Liz came clean that she, too, had powers. He had no real problems with it. She was his daughter. He had rather more trouble with the fact that she was a cop. Over the next couple of years, things remained relatively stable and Jared began to live his life again. Took contract cases that interested him or were requests from old friends, started dating a woman that he'd known for years. Things were good.
When all hell broke loose in his world in 2009, it was a nightmare. Liz by this point had left the police force, something he was grateful for. She was teaching in Washington Heights and seemed mostly okay. Then the attack on the school changed her path. And his. The writing on the wall was beginning to become evident and very very quietly, he began to pull out criminal law books. Writing briefs, searching precedents, talking to old friends who are judges about case law and how it might apply in the future to Evos. He would spend the next two years using the same drive that made him one of the top contract lawyers in the city to become as educated as possible on criminal law and how it COULD be used against Evos…. but more importantly, how it could be used FOR them.
By the time November 2011 rolled around, he is possibly the single best educated legal mind in the state on strategies to use already-established legal precedents to defend Evos. In the aftermath of 2011, Jared Harrison became a de facto member of Endgame, laying low through the Second Civil War while continuing legal research. After the war, he worked very publicly with Liberty and consulted with Cat Chesterfield, using all the information he'd amassed since 2009 to argue for (in court for whoever wanted to hire him) and help draft proposals for new Registration legislation and guidelines on how current laws are applicable to Evos. He also spent a great deal of time helping set up RayTech's legal division and just being Endgame's de facto dad-figure. By 2018, when all of the things he hoped to see and help along have been accomplished, he has semi-retired into being the CLO of RayTech Industries for Richard Ray.
