Molalla Pioneer

Donna Schmidt who drowned will be missed by many friends

By Abby Sewell
Molalla Pioneer

At times, a police report can condense a whole lifetime into a few quick and dirty facts. So it was when the body of Donna Laverne Schmidt was discovered in the Molalla River on April 6.

The immediately available facts were limited to a cause of death — drowning — and a record of a recent criminal conviction for forgery and tampering with drug evidence.

But those who knew and loved Schmidt say that 54 years of sweet and compassionate life more than outweighed several troubled years and a tragic death.

The more than 200 mourners assembled at Butteville Community Church on Saturday recalled a gentle soul with deep reserves of love, especially for children, the elderly and the weak.

Her two sons were not the only people present on Saturday who spoke of Schmidt as a mother.

Seventeen-year-old Samantha Felgar, one of Schmidt’s step-grandchildren recalled Saturday mornings spent at the Schmidts’ house, making pancakes and cuddling under the blankets to watch cartoons, and learning to swim under Donna Schmidt’s patient guidance.

“She’d take care of us all the time, and we loved going over there,” Felgar said.

Friends and neighbors, like Diane Smith, told a similar story.

“(Donna) helped raise my grandchildren,” she said. “They had lost their mother when they were really young, and they would go over (to the Schmidts’ house) all the time. Especially every October, I remember they would go over and carve pumpkins for Halloween.”

From the time when she babysat neighborhood children as a teenager to her years running a daycare center in the Molalla area, up to the last years of her life, Schmidt’s husband of 25 years, Mark Schmidt, said she exercised an irresistible pull on those who encountered her.

“Even up to contemporary days, she’d push a grocery cart up to the line at the Safeway, and a child would see her and crawl from his cart into hers,” he said. “She was such a magical creature - very magnetic, soft and sweet - not drippy sweet, but very secure.”

Donna survived a turbulent childhood, leaving her with painful memories that would never disappear, but also with a deep empathy for those who were suffering, Mark said.

Born in the community of Butteville, Ore., she moved to Portland at age three with her mother and step-father. They returned to Butteville in 1968.

Sixteen-year-old Donna was in the house in when her step-father shot himself twice in the head with a pistol. He survived but was confined to a state hospital for the rest of his life, laying a heavy burden of debt on the family.

At 18, Donna was accepted into the first class of nursing students at Clackamas Community College. She attended the program for one term before dropping out to work full time and help her mother pay the bills.

During her twenties, Donna worked for several years as a licensed practical nurse at a geriatric home in Lake Oswego. She loved the job, which appealed to her nurturing instincts, Mark said.

“There were countless people she ushered over the threshhold of death,” he said. “... And on the other side, so many lives she ushered into the world. She skated so close to the edge, always on the threshold of either in or out.”

During that time, Donna went to work as a nanny in the Molalla area, caring for the three and four-year-old children of Tim Roley. While caring for the children, she fell in love with the father. They were married in 1972 and had two sons of their own, Chris and Sean.

It was the 1970s and the hippy counterculture was still in full effect. Donna opened a 24-hour daycare center, with which she supported the family for several years, often caring for children whose parents had become entangled in the drug culture of the time.

“It was a different world then,” Mark said. “There wasn’t a drug war going on, and people were very naïve. …. A lot of times she was caring for those children whose parents were dropping out.”

Mark Schmidt, who was then working as a contractor in Corvallis, had known Roley since they both were boys. Needing extra hands on the job, he hired Roley to work for him building houses, and it was then that he and Donna met.

After working several months for Schmidt in Corvallis, Donna and Tim Roley returned to Molalla. Schmidt believes that it was during that time period, with her husband and his friends, that Donna first became involved with drugs, doing what used to be called “crank,” now commonly known as crystal meth.

“She struggled with meth addiction, but one day she stood up and said, ‘You can’t do this in my house any more,’” Schmidt said. “She took the boys by the hand and walked out, and they came up to Glen Avon, to me, and started a new life. She cold-turkey quit her meth habit and walked away.”

Mark had moved to the Molalla area, near the Glen Avon Bridge, in 1982. When Donna left her marriage and her addiction, he came to her aid. Together they lived and raised the two boys for eight years in an old house on a former fishing resort.

Donna spent her days gardening and welcoming friends and family to the house.

“Our doors were always open for people,” Mark recalled. “We’d just turn on the grills at five o’clock and on weekends she would cook for 300 people. It wasn’t a wild party scene, just people and families.”

Patti Nightingale, a friend and neighbor of the Schmidts, has a similar recollection.

“The river spot was always a barbecue,” she said. “Everyone went there, and there was always enough food to go around, and laughter and music.”

In 1992, the Schmidts returned to Butteville to care for Donna’s 77-year-old grandmother.

“Helen (Donna’s grandmother) was her real parent,” Mark said. “We spent 10 years at Grandma Walker’s.”

They lived across the street from the 114-year-old Butteville Community Church, where Mark would later design a second church building on the property to hold an expanded congregation. The building was completed and dedicated in November, 2006.

It was during the time in Butteville that Donna’s earlier demons returned. After Helen Walker’s death, Donna’s step-niece, then in her 20’s, moved into the back unit of the two mobile homes in Butteville where Donna and Mark had been living. A pair of young female friends joined her soon after, and they began to party regularly.

“It became apparent that there was more than just drinking going on there,” Mark said.

However, the Schmidts were occupied with caring for Donna’s grandmother, and after she died in 2000, Donna and Mark moved back to Glen Avon, leaving the niece and her friends behind.

Donna worried that her niece had become caught up in the meth scene, Mark said. She began going down to visit, in hopes of helping the younger woman escape a bad situation.

“Donna went back to Butteville to rescue Lisa (her niece) from meth addiction, and she got Lisa out,” Mark said. “Lisa moved to Florida and cleaned up, had a life and a baby. But that wasn’t enough for Donna. She thought she could rescue the other two girls.”

In the process, he believes, Donna was sucked back into her own addiction.

For five years, it was an unspoken demon dogging the marriage.

Afraid of driving her away, Mark said, he never pressed Donna to tell him the truth.

“I couldn’t break her heart or her spirit,” he said. “I believed in my love, how deeply I loved her, and I thought she would come to me when she was ready. … And maybe three times in the last three years, she came to me and her eyes welled up with tears, and she said ‘I need to talk to you.’”

But each time, she drew back before telling the truth.

However, through her connection with the drug scene, Donna had drawn attention from law enforcement. She was first arrested in July 2005 on charges of falsifying a prescription. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence, but the investigation continued, and the case was later reopened.

Mark said that Donna had obtained prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics after an accident in 2002, when a pile of plywood fell on her leg. However, he never looked closely into her medical affairs.

“Donna would never let me manage her health care or legal care,” he said. “She didn’t need a man to tell her what to do, and I respected that. But when she needed an attorney, I paid for it. I didn’t give her the money, because I wanted to make sure it went to the attorney.”

On Labor Day weekend of 2006, Donna was arrested after a routine traffic stop, on the same forgery charges. Because the courts were closed for the long weekend, she spent four days in the Marion County Jail.

“That was really traumatic for her,” Mark said.

Donna maintained her innocence for several months, eventually pleading no contest on three counts of identity theft and two counts of tampering with drug evidence on Jan. 10, 2007.

She was due for sentencing on April 16.

“We knew the sentence would be rehab,” Mark said. “And we were going to accept rehab, or so I thought.”

During the months following her arrest, Donna was in low spirits, somewhat withdrawn from the world.

On the morning of March 12, Mark noticed that she was acting strangely groggy. So instead of leaving the house at noon as he usually did, to pick up the mail and run business errands, he stayed home and watched her.

At 3 p.m., with Donna sleeping heavily, he finally prepared to go out on his daily route.

“Sometimes you just say the right thing at the right moment,” he said. “I woke her up and said ‘I love you, baby, and I’ll see you in just a bit.’ I was gone for two hours, and when I came back, everything was exactly as I left it, but she was gone.”

For the first time in all their years together, Donna did not come home that night. Mark was not immediately worried. His wife had spoken to him about wanting to get away, saying that if she disappeared, he was not to worry, that she would get in touch soon.

“I thought she was going to Jane Doe herself into rehab,” he said. “And I was so proud of her. I didn’t report her missing right away. In our situation, I knew that Donna just needed to get her head together, and the last thing she needed was to get arrested again.”

When she failed to contact him after two days, he began searching on his own. Finally he filed a missing person report with Clackamas County on March 22.

The river was running high the day she disappeared.

No one was on the scene to say how it was that she slipped off the river bank.

What is certain is that she left behind a community of hundreds who loved her deeply.

“Donna was basically an angel on earth,” Nightingale said. “You hear that phrase a lot, but rarely do you meet someone who really fits the description.”

As for Mark Schmidt, looking back on the last 25 years, he said, “We were really lucky. We lived a full life, but all too soon it’s over.”