Shooter arrested in Orlando office rampage 1
Woman killed for selling rock salt as dope 2
Lazy police let a serial killer run free 3
By Steve Huff in Mass Murder, homicide
Saturday, Apr. 4 2009 @ 6:51PM

UPDATE 2, SUNDAY, 4/5/09

This is already all over the Web - it's an old MySpace kept by Richard Poplawski under the screen name RichieDelicious. This is Poplawski's now-infamous MySpace blog post from the same account. A copy has been saved here.

UPDATE, SUNDAY, 4/5/09

Let's all congratulate The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on catching up with True Crime Report. I broke the news of Poplawski's association with Stormfront.org in this post yesterday. This is from the Post-Gazette's article published today:

[Poplawski's] online profile suggests someone at once lonely and seething. He wrote of burning the backs of both of his hands, the first time with a cigarette, the second time for symmetry. He subscribed to conspiracy theories and, by January 2007, was posting photographs of his tattoos on white supremacist Web site Stormfront. Among his ambitions: "to accumulate enough 'I punched that [expletive] so hard' stories to match my old man."

I haven't checked to see if the Post-Gazette's IP shows up in this blog's stats, but then again, everyone knows how to use Google now, or should. Either way, you heard it here, first.

ETA: Many thanks to Crooks & Liars for acknowledging this blog's sleuthing in this case. In the interest of balance (because I try to keep my political views out of this blog), thanks to Kurt Nimmo from InfoWars.com for his link to this post as well.

Original Post, 4/4/09, 6:51 p.m. ET 

News segment about the triple cop shooting in Pittsburgh.

Richard Poplawski's buddy Eddie Perkovic told the press that his friend feared that President Obama would ban guns. Perkovic seemed to think this had some bearing on the crime for which Poplawski stands accused: the shooting deaths of Pittsburgh, PA police officers Eric Kelly, Stephen Mayhle and Paul Sciullo III.

According to the Associated Press, Poplawski was wearing a bulletproof vest and 'laying in wait' for the cops early Saturday when law enforcement responded to a domestic disturbance call at the residence Poplawski shared with his parents. Between SWAT teams who responded to the standoff that ensued after the initial gun battle and the shooter himself, more than 100 rounds were fired, overall. Poplawski suffered non-fatal injuries to his extremities.

Eddie Perkovic was interviewed after the tragedy, and he said that his friend feared "the Obama gun ban" that he felt was "on its way." Poplawski also "didn't like our rights being infringed upon."

I checked out Perkovic's MySpace profile (won't link because a: it's easy to find and b: he might make it private, anyway) and found that he had a friend with this profile:

http://www.myspace.com/richp

Apparently, Richard Poplawski. Folks elsewhere online have photos from that page, but it was private by the time I found it. I did find Poplawski's Stumbleupon account. Stumbleupon is mainly for bookmarking interesting web pages, and Poplawski's account may be worth a close look just to get some idea of what he liked.

When I searched the full URL of Poplawski's apparent MySpace profile, though, I happened onto a thread at StormFront.org. It is a message board for folks who believe in "White Pride World Wide." Someone using the screen name "Braced For Fate" wrote the following:

as much as I HATE myspace

I do still have a page left over from when it was an okay site (circa late '04 early 05)

http://www.myspace.com/richp

BTW, OP, it requires your last name or email address to be able to add you as a friend, not the best setup if you're trying to expand your friend base

Google's cache of the StormFront thread, made in late February of this year, showed that at that time, "Braced For Fate's" screen name was "RichP."

Eddie Perkovic, for his part, clearly must share some of Poplawski's views, as his profile revealed a fear of "Zionists" and some kind of ethnic takeover of America. Among Perkovic's recommended reads were "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and The Turner Diaries.

The longer I do this crime blogging thing, the more I try to shy away both from editorializing and from fear-mongering. But I can't help but feel we'll hear from more Richard Poplawskis in the years to come. There are changes happening in the world that they, to say the least, don't like very much. After all, prior to 9/11/01, the worst modern act of terrorism committed on American soil was committed by Americans. And one of those Americans, Tim McVeigh, happened to have pages from The Turner Diaries with him when he was arrested. 

I'm just saying: while we were searching for the key to eliminating Al Qaeda, guys like Richard Poplawski didn't go anywhere. Hell, they may have even multiplied. Just remember that.