One Year After Donal Schneider Died During An Arrest, Questions Remain
By Steven T. Jones
Overweight and blustery, Donal W. Schneider could have had his fatal heart attack anywhere at any time. But he didn’t. This government critic who spent most of the last 20 years of his life fighting and fearing a system he felt illegally enslaved U.S. citizens died on a gravelly turnout on desolate Highway 58 with pepper spray in his eyes and his hands cuffed behind his back.
In no small measure it was Schneider’s "patriot" worldview, in particular his belief that the government has no constitutional right to require driver's licenses or car registrations, that led to his death.
That’s why this anti-government crusader was pulled over and arrested by a sheriff’s deputy between Creston and Santa Margarita on Schneider's usual Sunday morning trip to the flea market in San Luis Obispo.
Schneider’s 69-year-old heart gave out only after he was facedown in the dirt with a deputy on his back, pepper sprayed twice, his hands cuffed behind his back as he complained, "I can’t breathe." He remained cuffed even during the resuscitation efforts by deputies.
The coroner listed coronary atherosclerosis, basically a heart attack, as the cause of death. But the autopsy doctor also listed as a contributing factor "mechanical asphyxia," which meant his airway was being choked off, a condition that often triggers heart attacks.
The Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office have each concluded the deputies involved acted appropriately and Schneider’s death was accidental, while those close to Schneider maintain he was targeted and killed for his beliefs in a crime still being covered up by the Sheriff’s Department.
"As far as I’m concerned, the cops murdered him," said Ken Bundy, a Schneider friend and neighbor.
Between the official and conspiracy theorist versions of what happened are some lingering questions, for which nobody can provide satisfactory answers, even a year after Schneider’s death:
Why was the deputy arresting Schneider for an offense that usually results in just a citation? Why were such extreme measures needed to subdue an old man in poor health? Why was airway-blocking pressure applied to Schneider for so long? Why weren’t the handcuffs removed before starting CPR?
And those are just the unanswered questions from the actual incident. More come from the follow-up:
Why, if the death was the result of a heart attack, did the deputy coroner list it as "accident" rather than "natural"? Why was the autopsy and other routine information withheld from the public? Why was there no mention of the "mechanical asphyxia" cause in the coroner’s report or in official accounts given to the media at the time? Why is the Sheriff’s Department the only police agency in the county that doesn’t have a third party doing investigations of its in-custody deaths?
Many of these questions might be answered by a wrongful death lawsuit now being threatened by Schneider's companion of 12 years, Betty Myers of Atascadero, a suit that could pry open documents in the case that are still being withheld by the Sheriff’s Department.
"The penalty for the wrong license on your vehicle is typically a ticket and small fine, not death," said Myers’ attorney Wiley Ramey of San Simeon.
Yet the Myers suit could also be derailed by Schneider’s estranged son, a man who went from partner in his father’s legal crusades to the son who shot at and sued his father and was ultimately cut out of a hand-written will Schneider wrote just three weeks before his death.
Don Schneider Jr. believes his father’s death was justified, and he is battling Myers for control of the estate, control that Myers needs to file a wrongful death suit.
In life, Schneider was perhaps the most visible and vocal of the rural right-wing zealots who adopt the labels of "constitutionalist, patriot, or sovereign." They see government as a totalitarian police state and battling for our basic rights as a high calling. 
In death, Schneider continues to raise questions about those who hold the power.
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Donal Schneider had sued most of the county’s top officials–the sheriff, county clerk, judges, prosecutors, county supervisors, planners, animal control officers–by the time he was declared a vexatious litigant in 1993, barring any more lawsuit filings without a judge’s permission and $4,000 bond.
He was the target of five criminal prosecutions seeking to force him to comply with local ordinances and state laws that Schneider believed were unconstitutional violations of his rights as a "sovereign citizen."
In all his criminal and civil cases, Schneider represented himself, spending countless hours in the law library researching the hundreds of legal motions he has written, sometimes elaborate and well-constructed arguments despite the misspellings and grammatical errors.
He regularly shared his worldview, shaped with the help of North County ultra-conservatives and a network of "patriots" across the country, during the public comment portion of the weekly Board of Supervisors meetings and in other forums.
Schneider believed in gun rights, property rights, and maximum personal freedoms. He had a sharp mind and almost a lyrical matter-of-factness to his voice, which he would use to steadily bury his targets in a barrage of detailed, logical-sounding rhetoric.
Schneider moved further and further toward the political margins as he got older, a move that would ultimately place him in the situation that caused his death.
Born Nov. 3, 1928, in Southern California, Schneider grew up in Burbank with two sisters. At 17 he joined the Coast Guard and then the Navy, discharged in 1952.
Schneider worked at Vandenberg Air Force Base doing communications and electronics maintenance for nearly 20 years. He and his wife, Dorothy May, had two children, Donal Jr. and Cheryl.
When Don Jr. graduated from Allan Hancock College in 1977 with a degree in automotive technology, the father and son opened D&D Precision Machine together on the elder Schneider's property in Southern California. The battles that would consume the rest of his life started there.
"Due to personal conflicts that defendant Schneider Sr. had with local government officials concerning zoning it became necessary to move the enterprise to San Luis Obispo County," Schneider Jr. would later write in a lawsuit.
The next year they located the business in Atascadero, then to the 40-acre spread–a desolate spot about a mile out a dirt road off Highway 58 between Creston and Santa Margarita–that Schneider bought in 1979.
To house the business, Schneider built on the property a large bunkerlike building of concrete blocks, without permits or proper zoning, which Schneider, as a free and sovereign individual, didn't believe he needed.
That illegal building would be at the center of legal battles with the county that would drag on for several years and ultimately land him in jail for 40 days.
Schneider was part of a group of North County "patriots" that would meet regularly to discuss conservative issues, often at the Black Mountain Circle N Ranch.
"We had meetings and we talked about different things you could do with arguments to win in court," Bundy said.
After his wife's death on Oct. 14, 1987, Schneider focused more of his energy on his politics, including trying to start a citizen's militia in the North County and becoming active in the national network of such groups.
He spent a lot of time with Betty Myers of Atascadero. Both she and another friend, Richard Bastian, said Schneider had become increasingly worried about his safety in the weeks before his death.
It was a vague and unfocused feeling, Bastian said, yet also rooted in his belief that Schneider was "getting ready to blow the whole driver's license issue wide open," Bastian said, including a planned citizen’s arrest of Judge Kenneth Andreen.
"He said, ‘I'm really in fear of my life, Richard,’" Bastian said. So, at Bastian’s Atascadero home last Thanksgiving, Schneider handwrote a new will, leaving everything to Myers. Bastian, a notary public, notarized the document.
"Under no circumstances is there to be any consideration where my son, Donal William Schneider Jr., be recognized in any form to receive anything from my estate," read the will, complete with grammatical errors. "It is because of him that the problems that has fallen on me is of his illegal and unlawful doings. He gets nothing whatsoever of any value or personal worth."
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The only official narrative released on Schneider’s arrest was "Coroner’s Report No. 12,747," which provides an interesting–yet confusing and incomplete–look at the last hour of Schneider’s life.
Many of the blanks from the report were filled in for New Times during an interview with Chief Deputy Nick Marquart, the acting sheriff until last week, who relied on his own knowledge of the incident and investigative files that the Sheriff’s Department is refusing to release to New Times.
Deputy Mark Gunter was on routine patrol on Highway 58, a slow and curvy two-lane road that winds along hilly ridges to the rural area where Schneider lived.
He began following Schneider’s brown 1984 Cadillac Cimarron, which Marquart said kept crossing the double-yellow lines, cutting short the sweeping curves, so Gunter stopped him, at that point noticing "the registration tag was not properly affixed."
North County deputies knew Schneider, knew of his opposition to having to register his car, and had let him off with warnings in the past. But on this day, as Schneider and Gunter faced each other between their cars, Schneider was told that he was under arrest.
"He’s telling Don he’s under arrest, and he sort of steers him back to the patrol vehicle," Marquart said. "Don turns around and starts heading back to his car, the deputy grabs him and says, ‘C’mon, Don, we need to go.’ So Don doesn’t want to go."
Gunter tried to get Schneider’s hands behind his back to cuff him, but Schneider flexed up and resisted. Then, according to Gunter’s account to his superiors, Schneider reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded Buck knife, which he was trying to open when Gunter knocked it out of his hand.
"He’s at this point trying to take Don to the ground in a prone position, and Don continued to struggle, to try to turn and push away, and kept trying to get up and get away, and that’s when the deputy first showed Don the pepper spray and said, ‘Don, give it up,’" Marquart said. "He refused, and then [the deputy] went ahead and used the pepper spray on Don, trying to get him to comply. The pepper spray didn’t have a real affect on the situation. Don continues to struggle, so I think the deputy went ahead and pepper sprayed him a second time and then he attempted to pin him on the ground and handcuff him, he couldn’t do that, so he held him down until the second unit got there."
It took Deputy Sandy Leber about seven minutes to arrive, during which Schneider was facedown in the dirt, being held down by Gunter. If indeed "mechanical asphyxia" was a cause of death, it is during this time period that it must have occurred, with the pressure from the deputy blocking his airway.
When Leber arrived the two deputies handcuffed Schneider. It was around this time–neither the report nor Marquart say precisely when, whether before being handcuffed or after–that Schneider said, "I can’t breathe" and "my heart, my heart."
According to the coroner's narrative, "He was told to stop resisting, so that medical aid could be called. Subsequently, Schneider stopped breathing."
While Schneider was suffering a massive heart attack the deputies left him in handcuffs, making their CPR efforts ineffective. Barry Gustin, president of American Medical Forensic Specialists, says it is not possible to effectively deliver CPR to a handcuffed subject.
Marquart said he can’t explain why Schneider was left in handcuffs until it was too late to save him, but said the deputies may have still been concerned their suspect would get away.
"Don was still not compliant, and as long as he’s not compliant, I don’t know if the deputies were sure there was a medical situation," Marquart said. "When you still have a noncompliance, is he saying this to have the deputies back off on him and relax? And in this scenario, this is where they weren’t sure if there was a real medical problem."
Once paramedics arrived, it was too late to save Schneider. Officials say it was the resuscitation efforts that resulted in 11 broken ribs and at least a couple of missing teeth. Schneider was pronounced dead at the scene at 9:09 a.m.
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William Carlyle of Santa Margarita was a friend of Schneider, not even a close friend, but someone to whom the official version of Schneider's death didn't make sense.
So he and Mitchell Martin of Paso Robles tried to get more information from the Sheriff's Department and were probably the first members of the public or media to obtain a copy of Schneider’s autopsy after fighting through an initial denial.
"The more I dig into it the more I feel there is something radically wrong here," Carlyle said.
Based on the autopsy and inconsistencies in the official version of events, Carlyle and Mitchell have requested investigations by the FBI, Department of Justice, and state and federal attorneys general offices.
"They knew Don was a radical thinker who gave them a lot of trouble, and the deputy knew him," Carlyle said. "The initial stop was probably just to harass him, but it went too far."
Those who knew Schneider say he fought his battles in court, not in the streets, and they have a hard time believing he was so combative with deputies or that he pulled a knife.
"This whole thing is fishy as far as I'm concerned," said George Layman, a conservative activist from Nipomo. "I've known Don for 25 years and I've never known him to be violent."
Bundy, part of Schneider's political crowd for the ’80s, said, "I've known Don for years, and he was basically harmless. He didn't mind going to jail."
Layman and Schneider worked together on property rights issues through the ’80s, but grew apart in their activism.
"Then he went off on this ‘you don't need a driver's license to drive.’ To me, that was stupid. He should have stuck with property rights," Layman said.
Bundy had also grown apart from Schneider, not in his views, but in the commitment to devoting their lives to fight for those views, saying, "I don't have the energy for that now."
"Don liked to fight. He enjoyed a fight, and he would get mixed up with what he was fighting for," Bundy said. "He wanted his rights, but he let the fighting get in the way."
Yet he doesn't believe Don fought with the deputy, although he is not surprised by the "curbside justice" that he believes the Sheriff's Department meted out to Schneider.
"It's nothing new. It usually happens to black people, but if there are no black people around...," Bundy said.
Even many of Schneider's foes saw him as reasonable and nonviolent.
Larry Kelly of the county Planning Department dealt with Schneider a lot over the years. There were some tense standoffs, including a citizens arrest Kelly made on Schneider at his property in 1986 with deputies present.
"One time at Don Schneider's property, there was a crowd of 20 or 30 people all screaming at me," Kelly said. "But Don Schneider was the one who tried to calm everybody."
Kelly said he is a Republican who shared the value Schneider placed on freedom from government interference, but he believes basic planning and building codes are necessary with such an ever-growing population.
"Unlike a lot of the people up there, he wasn't violent. He didn't scream and rave. As an adversary, he's a lot better than a lot of those types," Kelly said. "He knew we were on different sides, but he respected your position."