Man admits hammer attack on mannequin, avoids charges in homeless killings

Reporting from LAS VEGAS —  A Nevada man who pleaded guilty in a hammer attack on a mannequin that was posed as a sleeping homeless person is also believed to be responsible for similar attacks that killed two men and injured a third in downtown Las Vegas, police said Wednesday.

But the plea deal that has Shane Allen Schindler facing eight to 20 years in prison for trying to kill what prosecutors called a “human decoy” spares him from being charged in the other assaults. Those attacks include the Jan. 4 bludgeoning death of Daniel Aldape, the Feb. 3 killing of David Dunn and a Nov. 30 assault on a sleeping homeless man.

“This is good for the community, that he’s taking this deal,” said police Capt. Andrew Walsh, commander of the downtown area where the attacks took place. “He’s off the streets.”

Schindler, 30, pleaded guilty Tuesday in the Feb. 22 attack on the mannequin, which had been placed by police in a normally deserted downtown area in hopes of luring the person they described as a stalker of defenseless homeless people.

The attack was caught on police video.

The plea deal also avoided a possible legal fight over whether Schindler tried to kill an inanimate object — an act that Clark County Public Defender Phil Kohn had derided as “a legal impossibility” — in a state where legal precedent appears to support the charge.

Laws in most states take into account what a defendant is thinking at the time of a crime. The Nevada Supreme Court in 1976 and 1989 chose intent over effect when it rejected arguments about what justices termed “the niceties of distinction between physical and legal impossibility.”

Kohn was in meetings Wednesday and was unavailable for comment about the Schindler case.

Schindler’s court-appointed defense lawyer, Ashley Sisolak, called the plea deal “tough but fair,” and said it was in Schindler’s best interest.

“We are pleased with the resolution of the case,” she said.

Prosecutors dropped a concealed weapon charge relating to the 4-pound ball-peen hammer that police said Schindler pulled from a plastic bag and swung with two hands to bash the blanket-covered head of the mannequin.