Mountain View Road, Burney, Calif. 

A 64-year-old man pleaded guilty this week to the killing of a California high school football star and the sexual assault of an 18-year-old. In the brutal 1984 attack in the remote town of Burney in Shasta County, Terry Arndt, who was also 18 at the time, was shot to death in his car while protecting the unnamed female victim from the assailant’s bullets. Forty-one years later, Roger Neil Schmidt, who was 23 at the time of the attack, has pleaded guilty to murder and sexual assault. 

Arndt was a track and field star at Burney High School and made the regional all-star football team before attending Shasta College in Redding, where he lived at the time of his death. At about 10 p.m. on the evening of Dec. 14, 1984, Arndt and his date were in a parked car in a wooded area on Mountain View Road in Burney, an unincorporated town about 50 miles northeast of Redding. 

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A large sedan with a dull finish reportedly drove close to the couple, so they drove on to a more private spot. The same car returned, and the driver flicked a cigarette at the side of Arndt’s car. The driver parked, approached on foot and shot Arndt through the driver’s side window with a .22-caliber rifle. “When the shooting started, Terry covered the female victim with his own body to protect her........

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