LYNN, Mass. -- A Ukrainian immigrant accused last week by the Justice Department of helping Nazis kill Jews during World War II apparently committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a rifle, police said today.
The body of Michael Popczuk, 63, accused last week in a denaturalization suit in Boston's U.S. District Court, was found Wednesday afternoon by his wife.
He was shot in the head and a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle was found in his hand. Police called it an apparent suicide.
'He kept telling me, 'I wish I could die,'' said his neighbor Claire Starkey. 'He was very depressed the last two weeks, about the government stuff. He never came out of his house.'
Another neighbor said she heard what she thought were firecrackers an hour before the body was discovered.
John Loftus, a former Justice Department lawyer who hunted Nazis in the United States, said, 'It means the guy was convicted inthe court of his own conscience.'
Last week, the Justice Department filed suit to revoke Popczuk's citizenship, charging that he concealed a past of helping Nazi forces persecute Jews in the Ukraine from 1941 to 1944.
The suit charged that Popczuk served in a Nazi-organized police force and in concert with the Germans 'murdered, assaulted, enslaved ghettoized and otherwise brutalized Jews and other civilians, including women and children in and around the villages of Kulchiny and Manivtsy.'
Popczuk had called the charges 'baloney' and said he was 'a plain soldier.'
According to the suit, Popczuk entered the United States in October 1954 and told U.S. immigration officials that he was Polish and spent World War II in Poland and Germany.
He was granted citizenship in Lawrence in March 1961, but left out his role in the Ukrainian police force in his application, the government said.
Lynn Police Captain Joseph Coppinger said that Popczuk's wife had told officers she had been afraid he would try to kill himself and had tried to hide weapons from him.
