The Last Gun (24 page)

It is perhaps not surprising that Charles's daughter, Margaret, took up drinking at an early age and (unsuccessfully) attempted
suicide at least three times, including shooting herself with a shotgun.
⁴³
Her marriage to Richard Poplawski produced the future concealed-carry-permit holder Richard Jr. The elder Poplawski left the home when his son was about three years old. Richard Poplawski Jr. was left largely to the care of his grandparents.
⁴⁴

The younger Poplawski followed the cycle of guns, violence, hatred, and failure. (All references to Poplawski hereafter are to the son, Richard Jr.) Said to have been bright and likable as a child, Poplawski spiraled down into anger and bitterness. By 2009, when he was twenty-two, he had already enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and lasted only three weeks. He had also tried dental school, computers, and a string of other jobs. He failed at them all. He went to Florida for a while, came back, and ended up living at home with his mother. The two had loud and bitter arguments. Within the last year, Richard had acquired two pit bull puppies from an animal rescue center.
⁴⁵
On the morning of Saturday, April 4, 2009, the action of one of the two dogs set off an explosion of violence that stunned Pittsburgh.

On Friday night, April 3, Officer Kelly worked the 11:00
P
.
M
. to 7:00
A
.
M
. shift.
⁴⁶
Richard Poplawski partied with friends,
⁴⁷
came home late, and surfed the Web. Among the sites he visited Saturday morning between 3:30
A
.
M
. and 5:00
A
.
M
. was the website of the white supremacist organization Stormfront.
⁴⁸

Poplawski left markers of his disintegrating identity and festering hatred on the Internet beginning in high school. According to Mark Pitcavage, director of the Anti-Defamation League's investigative research department, Poplawski's first Internet writings were about smoking marijuana and making dope pipes, which Poplawski said his mother was “cool with.” He first appeared on white supremacist sites in 2007, when he scribbled about his hatred of minorities and a government collapse that was supposedly coming. Poplawski believed that the federal government was building concentration camps for dissenters and that under President Obama's leadership it was planning to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and confiscate
Americans' firearms.
⁴⁹
“If a total collapse is what it takes to wake our brethren and guarantee future generations of white children walk this continent, if that is what it takes to restore our freedoms and recapture our land: let it begin this very second and not a moment later,” he wrote in March 2009.
⁵⁰
In 2007, Poplawski explained his hatred for blacks on the Stormfront hate site. “I attribute it, in part, to my solid upbringing . . . my mother made it clear that it would be frowned upon (to say the least, she actually told me she would bust me with a frying pan) to bring home a non-white girlfriend long before I had started thinking about bringing home any girls period, lol.”
⁵¹

Poplawski also posted several hundred times on the website of the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association, beginning in December 2007. Most of his posts there—made under the name of “RWhiteman”—discussed concealed-weapons permits, police arrests and gun confiscations he believed were illegal, and buying and selling guns.
⁵²
In an early post, Poplawski made a twisted allusion to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream Speech,” in which King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
⁵³
In December 2007, Poplawski wrote, “I can only hope I would be judged not on the make of my firearm, but on the content of my character.”
⁵⁴
In the same year, he posted this statement about police:

I dont [
sic
] care to bend at all from harassment from the police If I'm doing nothing more than exercising a right. If that means pissing a cop or two off, then so be it, if they are so ignorant as to try to trample my rights or inconvenience me in any way for no reason. I mean Im [
sic
] not talking about DISRESPECTING any cops, just not bending for them in fear as so many people do.
⁵⁵

Poplawski discussed his private “hit list” on a white supremacist Internet radio program he co-hosted sometime in the weeks
before April 4, 2009. The list included a Pittsburgh police officer, a black, a Jew, his ex-girlfriend, her parents, and neighbors' pets.
⁵⁶
“You have an individual who is, by any stretch of the imagination, a total failure in life with very deep feelings of inadequacy and filled with tons of hatred,” Louis B. Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
in 2011. “This guy had a mind-set that was anti-government and conspiratorial. He had organizations like these white supremacist groups telling him that it wasn't him. It was foreigners, minorities and the government causing his problems.”
⁵⁷

In addition to getting his concealed-carry permit—he encouraged Eddie Perkovic, his hate radio co-host, to get one too
⁵⁸
—Poplawski bought body armor (popularly called a bulletproof vest) from a friend.
⁵⁹
He built up an arsenal at home. His guns included a .380 semiautomatic pistol, a 22 caliber rifle, a .357 Magnum handgun, a shotgun, and an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle. He had more than a thousand rounds of ammunition, better than nine hundred rounds of it for his AK-47.
⁶⁰
“Hand everybody an AK and a sidearm,” Poplawski wrote on a Penguin hockey team fan website in December 2008. “Everybody. And see how long these mass murdering spree's [
sic
] last, if anybody even dares to attempt them.”
⁶¹

Poplawski bought at least three of his guns from Braverman Arms Co., a gun shop on Penn Avenue in Wilkinsburg, a borough in Allegheny County next to Pittsburgh.
⁶²
Wilkinsburg had its moment of national attention in 2000, when Ronald Taylor, thirty-nine, a black man, went on a racially motivated shooting spree. Taylor shot to death three white men and wounded two others. Investigators found lists and notes in Taylor's apartment that denounced whites, Jews, Asians, Italians, police, and the news media.
⁶³
The gun Taylor used also was traced back to Braverman Arms Co.
⁶⁴

Of all his guns, Poplawski most loved his AK-47 assault rifle. On December 8, 2008, Poplawski posted a comment on
Stormfront's website, in response to a question posed there, “If You Could Have Just One Weapon—SHTF [shit hits the fan], What Would It Be?” His answer was, “I guess I'd have to say my AK. Which is nice because it doesn't have to fall from the sky—its [
sic
] in a case within arms [
sic
] reach.”
⁶⁵
His friend and co-host Petrovic told the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
that Poplawski “always said that if someone tried to take his weapons away he would do what his forefathers told him to do and defend himself.”
⁶⁶

This is where matters stood early on the morning of Saturday, April 4.

Sometime before seven
A
.
M
., Richard's mother, Margaret, awoke and found that one of the dogs had urinated on the floor. She woke Richard and confronted him about the dog.
⁶⁷
After their argument, she called 911 at 7:03
A
.
M
. and asked that the police come and remove Poplawski.
⁶⁸
A police dispatcher sent the call out at 7:05
A
.
M
. as a domestic disturbance.
⁶⁹

Officer Kelly's shift was over. Officially off duty, he picked up his oldest daughter, Tameka, twenty-two. She also worked the night shift, as a nursing assistant at a health care facility.
⁷⁰
They were in his personal vehicle, only minutes from their home.

Richard Poplawski later told police that his mother was “extremely stupid” to call the police, knowing how well armed he was. Immediately after the call, he prepared himself for battle. He went into his bedroom, put on his ballistic vest, and grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun. “You're not going to do this,” his mother said to Richard. But his mind was made up. He later told a police detective that he thought in his head at that moment, “Come on with it.”
⁷¹

Pittsburgh police officers Paul J. Sciullo II and Stephen J. Mayhle arrived at the Poplawski house at 7:11
A
.
M
., eight minutes after Margaret's call to 911. She met them at the door, let them in, and said, “Come and take his ass.”
⁷²
Walking out of his bedroom with his shotgun, Poplawski saw Sciullo standing in the front doorway.
⁷³

“The police arrived much quicker than I expected,” he later
said in a statement to police. “I was caught off guard. This led to a snap decision to shoot. [I] just believed police were going to kill me.”
⁷⁴
He fired a single shot from the hip at Officer Sciullo, who was struck and immediately went down in the threshold.
⁷⁵

“What the hell have you done?” Margaret yelled at Richard before fleeing to the basement.
⁷⁶

As Officer Mayhle entered the house, Poplawski tried to shoot him, too. But his shotgun jammed. “Code 3! Code 3! Officer down! Officers are being shot at!” Mayhle shouted into his radio.
⁷⁷

A furious gun battle ensued between the two men, raging through much of the house. A trail of 40 caliber casings fired from Mayhle's service pistol indicated that the officer chased Poplawski from the living room, through the kitchen, into the dining room, and then into a hallway, where the trail stopped.
⁷⁸
That is when, it appears, Poplawski grabbed his AK-47 and started firing at Mayhle. The officer had fired eight 40 caliber rounds from his gun as he chased Poplawski. Two of his bullets struck Poplawski, one in the chest, near his heart. But Poplawski's ballistic vest stopped that bullet. Another bullet struck Poplawski in the leg. Mayhle then tried to run out of the house, but was struck down by bullets from Poplawski's assault rifle. Twenty-eight spent AK-47 casings were found just in the living room. Some of the bullets from those casings ripped through Mayhle's ballistic vest.
⁷⁹
Poplawski went outside and shot both officers again multiple times as they lay on the ground.
⁸⁰

At 7:15
A
.
M
., just a few blocks away, Officer Kelly and his daughter heard the sounds of gunfire as they pulled up to their house. Kelly told his daughter to run into the house. “I was shook up,” she later testified. “He told me to just go in the house, lock the door. He'll be fine.” She watched her father speed away. “She was banging on the door,” his wife, Marena Kelly recalled. “She was saying, ‘Daddy went down there.' ”
⁸¹

Meanwhile, Poplawski had holed up in his mother's bedroom. He saw Kelly drive up in his white SUV and opened fire on
him immediately with his AK-47 assault rifle.
⁸²
Kelly was hit by rounds from Poplawski's AK-47 three times before he could get out of his vehicle. The rounds easily punched through the car's metal and into Kelly's body. He was hit at least three more times by AK rounds outside the SUV, one of which was fatal, striking his right kidney, liver, and lung.
⁸³

Other officers responded to the scene, and a gun battle began. It lasted for two and a half hours. A detective testified that hundreds of rounds were fired from the guns Poplawski used that day—a 12-gauge shotgun, .357 Magnum revolver, and 7.62 mm AK-47 assault rifle.
⁸⁴
“Bullets were whizzing and pinging everywhere,” Sergeant James Kohnen said. “It was a meat grinder. We were totally outgunned—pistols against assault rifles.”
⁸⁵
A SWAT officer later testified, “We began to run low on ammo because we were sustaining so much fire.” He said each officer carried 125 rounds of ammunition into the fight.
⁸⁶
Margaret Poplawski was seen during the violent standoff, pacing in both the garage and the driveway, smoking cigarettes.
⁸⁷

Richard was eventually engaged in conversation by a police negotiator. “This is really an unfortunate occurrence, sir,” Poplawski said at one point. Later he assured the negotiator, “You know, I'm a good kid, officer.” He also moaned, swore, and spewed racial epithets.
⁸⁸
“Boy, getting shot is really painful,” he complained.
⁸⁹
At one point during the battle, Poplawski considered suicide, he later told police. But he decided against it. Prison wouldn't be so bad, he concluded.
⁹⁰
Eventually, he was worn down by his own wounds. “I need medical attention. It's really painful. I'm [expletive] shot. I'm in pain. I'm dizzy,” he said. “Get in here and get me some medication attention.”
⁹¹

Margaret Poplawski ran out to the police at 10:36
A
.
M
.
⁹²
Less than ten minutes later, her son surrendered.
⁹³
Richard Poplawski Jr. was convicted of three counts of murder and numerous other offenses. He was sentenced to death for the murders, and an additional 85 to 190 years were added for his other crimes.
⁹⁴