Officers' killer and his Web world

Richard Poplawski, the man charged with gunning down three Pittsburgh police officers Saturday, posted dozens of racist and anti-Semitic messages on a far-right Web site, decrying race-mixing and predicting chaos as the economy collapsed at the hands of "Zionist occupation," investigators said.

"It seems to me that our enemies would like nothing more than to see us retreat peaceably into the hills so that they could continue raping the remainder of the land without having to worry about any 'kooks' putting up a fight," reads one post dated Nov. 1, 2008. "I'll subscribe to the camp that believes we are running out of time. A revolutionary is always regarded as a nutcase at first, their ideas dismissed as fantasy."

An account kept on Stormfront.org, a gathering place for racial extremists and others from the far right, shows Poplawski's increasing belief in a coming economic and political collapse in the days leading up to the time of the shootings in which he is charged with killing Officers Paul Sciullo II, 37; Eric Kelly, 41; and Stephen Mayhle, 29.

The officers were shot while responding to a domestic disturbance at the home Poplawski, 22, shared with his mother.

Poplawski, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, was treated for gunshot wounds to his extremities.

Mourners yesterday lined up outside a Pittsburgh funeral home for the first of the viewings for the officers, who will lie in state at a municipal building tomorrow and then be remembered at a community memorial service Thursday at a University of Pittsburgh arena. They will have separate funerals.

Details of Poplawski's extreme racial and political views came to light yesterday after a leading researcher at the Anti-Defamation League delved into his postings at Stormfront, a white-supremacist Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan leader in Florida.

Mark Pitcavage, the ADL's director of investigative research, said Poplawski was logged on to Stormfront four hours before Saturday's shootings.

Initially, he posted under the name "Rich P," which, sometime after March 10, he changed to the more ominous-sounding "Braced for Fate."

Between Jan. 16, 2007, and Thursday, Poplawski expounded on race, interracial mixing, and the presumed power of Jews in America.

A Nov. 28 post on the Stormfront account identified as Poplawski's says: "I've been a longtime lurker on Stormfront, and I see myself probably ramping up the activism in the near future."

His final post expressed concerns about the changes in the logo of the Keystone State Skinheads, a neo-Nazi group.

On March 13, the Stormfront account linked to Poplawski carried a lengthy post predicting economic collapse, engineered by a Jewish conspiracy.

Still another post expounded about his dislike of African American, Latina, and Asian women. "Don't mix your blood with dirt, son," he posted.

At one point, advising another poster on ideal weapons, he praised his "AK" - an AK-47, the kind of weapon police say he used to kill three of their ranks Saturday.

Asked Dec. 8 which weapon he would want if he could keep just one, he wrote, "I guess I'd have to say my AK. Which is nice because it doesn't have to fall from the sky - it's in a case within arms reach."