Sherman also quoted the police as saying Poplawski had a "cold demeanor" and sometimes yawned while answering their questions. He thought he killed five.Richard Poplawski thought Officer Stephen J. Mayhle was faking being dead as he lay in front of a Stanton Heights home on Saturday morning. So he shot the officer again, investigators said he told them.
He also shot Officer Paul J. Sciullo II a second time as he lay inside the house, police said Mr. Poplawski told them.
Jill King Greenwood and Jeremy Boren of the Trib have this:
During interviews with police, Poplawski, 22, described how he fired extra bullets into the motionless bodies of Officers Stephen J. Mayhle and Paul J. Sciullo II "just to make sure they were dead," detectives said.Initially it was going to be a martyrdom by ZOG but at some point things shifted. Sherman of the P-G:
The gunman later told investigators he had planned for police to kill him. But he changed his mind and agreed to surrender, hoping to go to prison so he could write a book.According to Greenwood and Boren, there are some discrepancies between Poplawski's story and his mother's:
Margaret Poplawski told investigators she answered the door, let the officers in and said, "Come and take his ass," according to a police affidavit. She said once Sciullo and Mayhle got about 10 feet into the living room, she heard gunshots and turned to see her son about 6 feet away with a rifle in his hand. She said she screamed "What the hell have you done?" and ran into the basement.A few paragraphs later they say that detectives are looking into whether they can charge the mother.Richard Poplawski told detectives that he put on a bulletproof vest and got a shotgun, AK-47 and handgun before his mother opened the door to admit the officers and that she knew he was armed, investigators say.
3 comments:
it just keeps getting worse and worse.
when i saw his mother talking to a reporter yesterday and saying that she would be calling a "press conference" friday after the policemen's families had time to morn, well i just got a cramp in my stomach.
oh god, what is going on?
This family is scum.
I wonder if Poplawski’s lawyer (Lisa Middleman, per the PG) is going to try to get him off on the technicality that she has not seen all the reports of the police conversations with her client (maybe she can claim the conversations violated his Miranda rights). Actually, I expect she may try to obtain a plea bargain that trades life imprisonment in a psychiatric facility for the State not taking his life. If the DA does not take a plea (and there are good reasons not to) then I expect a motion for change of venue and perhaps an insanity defense.
I don’t know exactly what to think about the mom. If she saw him put on the vest and pick up the AK-47 and/or a shotgun before the police arrived, she should have exited the house immediately and gone to a neighbors and used a phone to warn the police. Of course, all of us have had lapses in what we should do versus what we end up doing. She was apparently sick of her son’s behavior, yet she was careful to characterize his weapons as legal, to try to prevent her son from coming to any serious harm. A really unfortunate situation, one where the system failed in lots of ways, and where the people involved failed to, were unable to afford to, or were unaware of the potential for help to avoid what occurred. Her behavior since the incident, detailed in the Trib article, does not put her in a particularly good light.
Meanwhile, I guess I am not surprised to see some commenters dotted around the local blogosphere proclaiming their rights as gun owners. One person spoke about the current political climate, and something about how the founding fathers wrote the second amendment because they knew the government (apparently our government) would become corrupt and oppressive one day (perhaps, but not explicitly stated, today?). I don’t know if Congress will do anything about gun control or not. If it does, it may have to be Mike Doyle (or a Representative from Binghamton) who introduces the bill. Commenters are saying that the previous ban did no good, and that bans in general (such as Prohibition) do no good. There is something to that, I am sure the powerful gun lobby would do there best to water down a gun bill. Still, I would respectfully argue that if the sale of high capacity magazines is banned, it may limit the damage that occurs with these shooting sprees. Make no mistake, if Poplawski had only five round clips, he still might have killed the three officers. But some other situations might have less damage than they would otherwise.
But even that suggestion is met with scorn. The Second Amendment can not be abridged, and every attempt to limit the firepower of today’s guns is a direct attack on law abiding citizens by corrupt and evil politicians. I guess the international conspiracy of the UN and black helicopters or of whatever particular religious or ethnic group is only afraid of 30 round magazines.
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