Photo: Netflix
He claimed to be a witness to a crime. He was actually the criminal.
By Rebekah Kuschmider — Written on Feb 13, 2020
Dan Schneider is a Louisiana pharmacist and father of two. In 1999, his son Danny was shot in Louisiana's 9th Ward, outside of New Orleans, during a drug deal gone wrong. The family hadn't even known that he had a problem with drugs.
In the wake of the shooting, Schnieder felt abandoned by the police and he pursued the investigation on his won for a year and a half. Along the way, he met 15-year-old Jeffery Hall, who said he was a witness to the killing and offered to help Schneider get justice for his son.
The real story of Jeffery Hall was much more complicated than what he told Schneider. The new docu-series The Pharmacist on Netflix details the complicated investigation into the crime and the opioid crisis in Louisiana as a whole.
Who is Jeffery Hall? Read on for all the details.
1. What happened to Danny Schneider Jr.?
In The Pharmacist, the audience learns that Danny Junior was a 22-year-old student at a community college in 1999. He had gone through a rough patch at the end of high school but nothing so serious that his parents were concerned about him. One evening, he told his family he was going out for the night and they went to bed assuming he would be home later. Instead, police arrived at their house at 2 am to deliver the news that Danny had been shot and killed. The family was stunned to discover that he had been in the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans trying to buy drugs when he died.
2. Drug crime was rampant at the time.
Schneider explained that his son Danny's death occured during the crack epidemic in New Orleans and drug-related crime was rampant. Because Danny had been shot during a drug deal gone wrong, the police didn’t give the case the scrutiny that the family wanted and Schneider felt law enforcement was dismissive of his son's death. Schneider also noted that the attitude around drug-related killings like this was often that if a white kid was in that neighborhood to buy drugs, no one should be surprised if they got shot.
In his grief, Schneider took up the cause of finding his son’s killer himself. He started canvassing the neighborhood, looking for a witness to the crime. Thanks to various donations, he was able to offer a reward of $10,000 to anyone with information leading to a conviction. After months of trying to shake loose any information, one person finally came forward.
3. Who is Jeffery Hall?
Jeffery Hall was 15 at the time Danny was murdered and he lived in the neighborhood where the crime took place. Hall told police he knew Danny; he had sold drugs to him in the past. The night of Danny's death, Hall claimed he had driven up and he was riding over on his bike to approach him, but before he got to the 22-year-old, a man known know as Scarface came over and shot him.
The Schneider family hoped this would be the end of the search for their son's killer but when the police checked on Scarface's alibi, it turned out that he couldn't have been the shooter because he had been in jail. Disappointed, Schneider resumed his search, this time with Hall as his ally as he tried to get more information.
4. Everything Hall initially told Schneider turned out to be a lie.
As Schneider continued his search for his son's killer, he started making cold calls to people who lived in the area where the crime had taken place, eventually reaching a woman named Shane Madding and she stunned him by saying she had been standing nearby when Danny was killed. Then she dropped a bombshell into the investigation: she said Hall, himself, was the shooter.
Madding told the cameras that Hall's mother was her best friend and she had known Hall, who was 15 at the time he murdered Danny, his whole life. In her version of events, he simply walked over to Danny's truck, shot him, then came over to her and said: "You see what I did?" Madding originally kept silent over fear of retribution by others in the drug trade who Hall was connected to. She eventually agreed to testify in the trial.
5. Hall pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
The news that Hall had been the killer shook Schneider. "Not only did I find out that Jeffery was the killer but he had betrayed me. He had lied to me. It sounds petty, but that almost bothered me as much, Schneider reveals in the docu-series. "I trusted him. He was gonna help me. And he was the killer."
The case finally went to trial a year after Madding's revelation and Hall took a plea deal for manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He said that the bus ride to the prison was the first time he had been outside of New Orleans.
"I don't feel good about [the murder]," he said when producers asked why he tried to pass himself off as a witness. "I was just trying to get the heat off me. I just made up a story ... I thought I had everything figured out. I was dealing drugs, and I thought I was a big boy."
6. Where is Jeffery Hall now?
Hall served 13 years od his sentence before being released. He was 29 when he got out. He said that while he was in prison, he tried to make good use of the time. He finished school and went on to study data processing. "I took that time and tried to better myself ... put it all into how it all could have been prevented but it's still an everyday struggle for me," he said. "I ask this of myself often: how can I move forward when I know that I did wrong? Wish I could change it. But I can't."
He didn't share what he's doing now or if he returned to New Orleans.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.