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S. Side blaze kills one Victim involved in killing last year Monday, February 26, 2001 By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
A South Side fire yesterday morning killed a 23-year-old man who 11 months earlier was implicated in a bizarre homicide involving a skinhead friend and a local neo-Nazi leader.
David Kopp died of smoke inhalation, according to the Allegheny County coroner's office. An arson investigator with the Pittsburgh Fire Bureau said the fire did not appear suspicious, but the investigation was continuing.
The fire was reported just after 8 a.m. Firefighters found Kopp in a second-floor bedroom of the two-story wood-frame house at 2735 Patterson St.
He was pronounced dead at 9:25 a.m. at Mercy Hospital.
According to the building's owner, Russell Greil of Munhall, Kopp had rented the $495-a-month two-bedroom house since November. Greil said Kopp's brother and a woman also lived in the house, but he did not know their names.
Last February, Kopp and two other men talked their way into the Mount Washington home of Michael Stehle, the Pittsburgh recruiter for the National Alliance.
The National Alliance is a far-right white supremacist organization led by a former associate of the late George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party.
Kopp and the two men were "traditional" skinheads, a movement which began in working-class England in the late 1960s.
Unlike neo-Nazi skinheads, traditional skinheads are opposed to racism.
The three men planned to beat a roommate of Stehle's, but their plan went awry, and Stehle ended up shooting and killing Brian Hartzell, 24, of Salem, Ohio.
After initially filing homicide charges against Stehle, the Allegheny County district attorney's office withdrew them because of concerns about being able to prove its case.
The charges levied in the case against Kopp and Nate Deaton, the third man, and their adjudication could not be determined yesterday.
Greil said that although the house was rented to three people, neighbors told him there were often as many as 15 people in the house at various times.
He said Kopp was "very nice" and always paid his rent on time.
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