Vegas police catch homeless murderer with mannequin decoy – PB/TK
Mannequin sting catches suspect in Las Vegas homeless murders – by Dan Hernandez in 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 a bid 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 6 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.
Continue to theguardian.com article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/07/homeless-murders-las-vegas-police-arrest-mannequin-plot
