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It had been years since Lyndell Schneider worked, and she was used to being alone when her adult son wasn’t home. But when Macayla Deponte moved in last summer after she started dating Schneider’s son, the mom was surprised at how quickly she adapted to having the boisterous young woman around.

Now, a month after Deponte was killed by Maui police during an apparent mental health crisis, Schneider can’t get used to how quiet it is again.

“The silence is too loud,” she said.

She said her 22-year-old son, Trayden Schneider, had called 911 because he was worried that Deponte would hurt herself after they broke up. Within minutes of the officers’ arrival at the Makawao home, Deponte was shot by an officer after she moved toward him with a knife.

Schneider said her son did not believe Deponte would purposefully hurt him or anyone else. “He was afraid for her,” she said.

Since Deponte’s death, Schneider and her family have grappled with a mixture of grief, guilt, anger and fear. Deponte lived with Schneider and her son in an ʻohana unit, built behind the house where Schneider and her siblings grew up, for just nine months. The young woman’s violent death now overshadows the family’s innocent childhood memories of the home. 

“This was our family home, and our parents’ first house,” Schneider said one day in mid-February, her eyes fixed on the spot in the kitchen where Deponte had encountered the police, according to body camera video. “It’s hard because now it doesn’t feel so innocent.”

She had placed a Mason jar filled with fresh flowers on the concrete floor near the kitchen doorway to mark where Deponte was killed.

A Young Romance

Deponte and Schneider’s son, Trayden, met on a dating app last spring, and the then-19-year-old quickly moved in, Schneider said. The couple shared a bedroom in the ʻohana, located behind the main house where Schneider’s sister lives with her teenage daughter.

Deponte was Trayden Schneider’s first serious girlfriend, said his uncle Eric Fernandez, who lives next door. “They always seemed like giddy teenagers,” he said.

Trayden Schneider was quiet, spending most of his free time playing video games, said Janelle Fernandez, Schnieder’s sister. Deponte, on the other hand, was outgoing and spontaneous. The couple would fill in coloring books, build houses out of playing cards and visit the island’s trampoline park, she said. It seemed like they went out to watch the sunset together every night.

“He just loved her,” Fernandez said. “He would make her bubble baths when she came home, and they had a really playful, innocent relationship.” 

Trayden Schneider spoke briefly with Civil Beat after the shooting, but he said he wasn’t ready to talk.

His family said they quickly accepted Deponte as a member of the family, and they were taken by the earnest, childlike way she viewed the world. She loved animals and had special bonds with the Schneiders’ 3-year-old Shih Tzu, Lulu, and rabbit, Chomper. 

But Deponte was also guarded, they said, and revealed little about her past. “You could tell she didn’t trust people. You could tell that so many people had abused her trust,” Schneider said. “When I met Macayla, I saw such a broken soul.”

Over time, the family pieced together an incomplete picture of Deponte’s life before she came into their lives. She told them she had been raised by relatives until the age of 9, when she went into the foster system. She said she had been involuntarily hospitalized for psychiatric reasons at least once. She dropped out of school in her early teenage years and had experienced periods of homelessness.

Deponte lived in Haiku with her ex-boyfriend and their daughter, then two years old, until May, when he filed a petition for a temporary restraining order. In his petition, he said that Deponte had become more unstable in the last year, and that he feared for his and his child’s safety. He wrote in his petition that in one incident, Deponte punched him several times and threatened to leave with their daughter. (Civil Beat wasn’t able to reach Deponte’s ex-boyfriend to comment.)

Deponte denied the allegations, but a judge ordered her to stay away from her ex-boyfriend. She was allowed to visit her daughter, at least temporarily.

Despite Deponte’s struggles, Schneider, who had always longed for a daughter, said she bonded with her. Schneider supported Deponte as she studied for her high school equivalency test, purchased her first car and landed her first job.

The Two Macaylas

Although Deponte “was slowly moving in the right direction,” Eric Fernandez said she “did have a lot of heaviness and baggage that was still weighing her down.”

The slightest thing could upset Deponte, Trayden Schneider’s family said, and she struggled with feelings of anger, fear and depression. Occasionally something would set her into a rage and she would seem to lose control. Janelle Fernandez said Deponte sometimes tried to numb her emotions with alcohol, but it worsened her tirades.

“There were times where she would get very angry, and I would just go up to her, and I’d grab her hands, and say, ‘Stop, look at me,’” Schneider said, shaking her hands as if she were holding Deponte’s. Sometimes it took her a few seconds to snap out of it, Schneider said. “It’s almost like she didn’t even know what was going on.”

Afterward, Deponte often said she couldn’t remember what she had said or what had upset her, according to Trayden Schneider’s family. She would be overcome with remorse and sink into an all-consuming depression, they said.

Janelle Fernandez said Trayden struggled with how to respond to Deponte’s mood swings.

“I don’t think he was equipped — like none of us are — to navigate what Macayla was dealing with,” she said. “I just don’t think she had the tools to be in a healthy relationship.” 

A Relationship Unravels

In the weeks leading up to Deponte’s death, her boyfriend’s family said, it was clear their relationship was unraveling. When the couple broke up on the afternoon of Feb. 1, Deponte became enraged, grabbed a knife from the kitchen and locked herself in a bedroom. 

Trayden Schneider later told his family that he called 911 because he hoped police could calm Deponte down and connect her with mental health and housing resources.

When two officers arrived, she was barricaded in a bedroom and yelling incoherently while playing loud music, according to the Maui Police Department. Officers tried to communicate with Deponte from outside the house and went inside after a few minutes. 

That’s about when the body cam video starts. It shows Deponte walked into the kitchen carrying the knife. The officers yelled at her: “Let me see your hands! Put the fucking knife down!”

Deponte raised the knife and walked toward an officer. Police said the officer shot Deponte twice. Less than eight minutes passed between when the police arrived and called for medical help for Deponte, according to Maui police.

Schneider and her family said they believed Deponte’s death could have been avoided if the police had tried to deescalate the situation.

“What I would like to have seen, honestly, was the police officers doing their job, talking her down, having a little bit more patience and more compassion, having taken a little bit more time to talk to her and understand what was really going on, because they didn’t,” Schneider said. “They just came in, guns blazing. Macayla was worth and deserved a lot more.”

Civil Beat requested the department’s use-of-force policy a month ago, but the department hasn’t provided it. It declined to provide body camera footage showing what happened before Deponte entered the kitchen. 

Travis Norton, a retired police lieutenant and use-of-force expert in California, reviewed the video at the request of Civil Beat. “What I saw was a reasonable use of deadly force, based on the limited set of video that I saw,” he said. 

Through a partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Health, the Maui Police Department periodically offers officers optional training on how to respond to people experiencing a mental health crisis. The police department didn’t answer a question about whether either of the officers who responded to participated in that program.

Family Has Heard Little Since

Three days later, Maui Police Capt. Nelson Hamilton spoke at a news conference about the shooting. Though he acknowledged that “a family is grieving,” he said the incident shows the risks police face. If Deponte had survived, he said, she “would have been charged with attempted murder in the first degree.”

That rhetoric was unnecessarily cruel, Trayden Schneider’s relatives said.

“It was their way of saying, ‘Well, it’s a good thing she died, because if she lived you would be in an even more difficult situation,” said Lyndell Schnieder.

In a response provided by police spokeswoman Alana Pico, the department acknowledged “the emotional impact” of the shooting. It said the department strives to resolve situations peacefully, but “officers are often forced to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations, where their actions depend on the behavior of others.”

“Unfortunately, mental health crises play a significant role in many officer-involved shootings,” the statement said. “We remain dedicated to improving our response to individuals facing mental health challenges to seek the safest possible outcomes through our Crisis Intervention Training.”

The family has heard little from authorities. Because they aren’t relatives, they aren’t entitled to information about whether Deponte’s body has been claimed. They hadn’t heard anything about a memorial service. The night of the shooting, someone who said they were a relative of hers came to the house to collect Deponte’s belongings, Schneider said.

She stayed with relatives for several days after the shooting because she couldn’t bear to be in the place where Deponte had died. When she returned, she found a towel that appeared to have been used to clean up her blood.

“I just hugged it. I can’t describe what I felt. It’s incomprehensible. It was shock, fear and my stomach was just in knots,” she said, her voice cracking. “There was guilt and every single emotion you could think of — not in a good way. It’s absolutely horrible.”

Deponte had not always been kind, Schneider said, but she wanted so badly to become better. Over those nine months, Schneider had encouraged her to set goals and find help. 

 “I was chipping away at those walls that were so tough,” she said. “I know if there was more time, I would have been able to chip away more at those walls.”

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Atherton Family Foundation, Swayne Family Fund of Hawai‘i Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and Papa Ola Lōkahi.