Roachdale man arrested after Schnellville mailbox report, pellet gun found

A Roachdale man was arrested after Dubois County deputies and Indiana State Police responded to reports of a man acting belligerently in the roadway in Schnellville, going through mailboxes and carrying a gun. Officers quickly located the vehicle and stopped it, then found a pellet gun inside. The suspect, identified as 63-year-old Franklin L. Haas, was charged with operating a vehicle while intoxicated, possession of marijuana, possession of paraphernalia and battery by bodily waste.

Haas is also accused of spitting on a jail officer while he was being secured in a patrol vehicle, which added the battery-by-bodily-waste charge to the case. Officers said they detected the odor of cannabis during the stop. The pellet gun did not amount to a confirmed firearms threat, but it helped explain why the original mailbox report drew an immediate response in the rural Jefferson Township community.

The investigation widened the next day, when officers were called back to Schnellville for vandalism at the Schnellville Conservation Club and damage to a grave marker in Schnellville Cemetery, also listed in cemetery records as Sacred Heart Cemetery. Haas was later charged with cemetery mischief and criminal mischief tied to those incidents. The Dubois County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said July 1 was the last day cemetery mischief existed as a standalone Indiana offense before it was folded into criminal vandalism.

Schnellville is an unincorporated community in Dubois County, and both the cemetery and the conservation club are long-standing local landmarks. The Schnellville Conservation Club was formed in 1937, according to nonprofit records, and records for its lake dam date the structure to 1945. In a small community where mailbox tampering, roadside disorder and cemetery damage can quickly raise concern, the case moved from a citizen complaint to a string of charges in two days.