Las Vegas police to display ‘decoy dummy’ at Mob Museum event

A mannequin meant to save lives was used this year to catch a murder suspect, and later this month it will be on display at the Mob Museum.

It may seem weird, allowing the public to gawk at a key piece of evidence used for a case in which two men died; Metropolitan Police Department Capt. Andy Walsh will be the first to admit it. He heads the downtown Las Vegas patrol area where those two men were bludgeoned to death while sleeping.

But the whole case was strange, Walsh told the Las Vegas Review-Journal this week.

“We probably owe the community an explanation,” he said.

That’s what the Sept. 19 event, titled “Metro Police Sting: Operation Decoy Dummy,” is meant to be. Walsh will be there to answer questions during the panel discussion. A prosecutor and a homicide detective also are expected to participate.

“It received a lot of media attention when we did it, but it was something that was obviously not traditional,” Walsh said of the decision to disguise a CPR-training dummy as a sleeping man to safely ensnare a suspect. “It involved a lot of risk and a lot of coordination. And once we got to the point where the mannequin was attacked, it involved a whole separate set of challenges.”

Shane Schindler, the man who walked up to the dummy in February and began wailing on it with a hammer, was promptly arrested and charged with attempted murder. But even after Schindler was jailed, investigators struggled to find evidence strong enough to pursue charges in the killings.

Police placed Schindler in the area of Ogden Avenue and City Parkway, just west of downtown’s glowing neon, about the same time Daniel Aldape, 46, and David Dunn, 60, were killed. A third man was similarly attacked in the area but survived. Detectives pointed to a selfie Schindler took in November that shows him lying on his back nearby.

Still, they lacked indisputable evidence, and Schindler claimed during an interview with homicide detectives that he knew he was not attacking a human when he hit the dummy. He ultimately pleaded guilty to attempted murder, and a judge last month ordered him to spend eight to 20 years in prison.

“When we did it, we didn’t ask for permission,” Walsh said this week. “I knew it was my responsibility as captain in the community to do this. If we sat back and waited for information to be developed, we could have had a third murder.”

Walsh has gotten some flack about the move — some called it “creative,” others called it “crazy,” he said. But he maintains it was important for him and his officers to make an arrest.

“A high-profile event in an affluent area always seems to get more media attention, more police attention. But when it happens at Ogden and City Parkway, or when it happens on Owens and Las Vegas Boulevard, and they go unsolved, it can be interpreted that we care more about one than the other,” Walsh said. “But we do care.”

He said the Mob Museum panel will serve as a way for him to “talk about the story and remind people that two men they’d never heard of lost their lives on the street corner one night for no reason other than they didn’t have a house to sleep in.”

The mannequin will be on display only the night of the event, museum spokeswoman Ashley Miller said.

“We are really trying to bring light to what happened downtown and the creativity brought forth by Capt. Walsh and the downtown area command,” she said.

Contact Rachel Crosby at rcrosby@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-8135. Follow @rachelacrosby on Twitter.