Police used a unique ploy in their efforts to find the perpetrator behind brutal deaths of two men living on the streets of Las Vegas

It was 3am at a secluded Las Vegas intersection, a place home to little else except the occasional homeless person sleeping on a bed of gravel. A figure strode back and forth, his attention drawn to a motionless form under some blankets.

The man, identified by police as Shane Schindler, 30, pulled a hood over his head. He lifted a four-pound hammer with both hands to “generate maximum force”, according to police, and brought it down on the recumbent shape “with the intent to kill”.

And perhaps Schindler would have killed someone, except that his target was already lifeless: it was a mannequin. Despite this fact, police quickly arrested him.

The bizarre-sounding ploy was an attempt to snare the perpetrator of two far more heinous acts.

Two homeless men have been murdered at the same location, surrounded by freeways and far from the neon madness of the Strip, since the beginning of 2017. Daniel Aldape, 46, was found dead on 4 January still wrapped in his blankets, the victim of blunt force trauma. David Dunn, 60, was murdered on the opposite corner on 3 February, also having suffered extreme head trauma.

“As I say every time a homeless person is murdered, the sidewalk or a soft patch of dirt is no place for a human being to take their last breath,” said a Las Vegas police captain, Andrew Walsh. “We took those crimes very personally.”

Walsh told the Guardian that his officers placed a human decoy on the ground every night following Dunn’s murder. “We used some tactics you wouldn’t normally see, but we didn’t have a lot of evidence to go by,” he added, noting that there were no witnesses or apparent motive in the recent killings.

Surveilling the area with hidden cameras and officers, police saw Schindler bludgeon the dummy and immediately arrested him on charges of carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. The successful gambit was initiated by police on 22 February, although details have only recently come to light. Homicide detectives are questioning Schindler in relation to the murders, but the operation is ongoing, Walsh said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The intersection where the mannequin was placed and the body of Daniel Aldape was found. Photograph: Dan Hernandez/The Guardian

Schindler’s public defender said the concealed-weapon charge did not hold water. “Our defense is that carrying a hammer in a bag is not carrying a concealed weapon under the law or all the construction workers and carpenters in this town would be arrested tomorrow,” said Daren Richards. “If they’re going to charge him with something else, let’s see the charges. But as of right now all that other stuff is irrelevant.”

Though the Las Vegas murders are extreme in their grisliness, such acts directed against homeless people are not uncommon. There were 27 fatal attacks on homeless individuals in 2015, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, which also documented a total of 1,650 acts of violence against homeless individuals by housed perpetrators between 1999 and 2015, largely by men in their teens and 20s.

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Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, believes these sorts of crimes are linked to derisive portrayals of homelessness in pop culture and viral videos such as “Bumfights”, in which homeless men are paid to brawl. “They’re attacked not just because of bias but because they’re vulnerable,” he noted.

The homeless residents of Las Vegas are particularly vulnerable since Nevada is one of four western states, along with California, Hawaii, and Oregon, in which over half the homeless population do not reside in shelters or temporary housing – they live on the streets or in vehicles, parks, tunnels, and other places not fit for humans to stay.

At the intersection, a homeless woman named Stacie Carney, 40, said the killings had shocked her community. “I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe it. It’s scary as shit.” The police operation impressed her. “I think it’s really cool how they set up the dummy.”

Little is known about the two victims.



“They are the lost faces of our community,” said Walsh, the police captain.

“No one knows who David Dunn and Daniel Aldape were. It’s sad that they’ll live forever in my mind as two homeless guys who were murdered. They were not harming anybody. That’s where they lived – in that neighborhood – and that’s where they died.”