DAN FITZSIMMONS LEAD PROSECUTOR
The lead prosecutor in the case against former East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld has spent 37 years in the Allegheny County district attorney’s office, with 30 of those working exclusively on homicides.
Dan Fitzsimmons, Allegheny County chief trial deputy district attorney, has prosecuted more than 170 homicides in his lengthy career.
Mr. Fitzsimmons, 62, was the prosecutor on the case of Steven M. Tielsch, accused of the 1986 shooting death of Neal S. Rosenblum. Mr. Rosenblum, an Orthodox Jew visiting Pittsburgh from Canada, was gunned down in Squirrel Hill as he walked back to his in-laws’ home from services at a local synagogue.
The case went unsolved for two years before police got a tip that Tielsch had confessed to a cellmate at the Allegheny County Jail.
The case went to trial four times over a period of 16 years — with the first three ending with the jurors unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Finally, a jury in 2002 found Tielsch guilty of third-degree murder.
Mr. Fitzsimmons also prosecuted the case against William Snyder, a former PennDOT employee, accused of causing a crash that killed six people on Interstate 279’s high-occupancy vehicle lanes in 1995.
That case, which ended in a plea agreement, pitted Mr. Fitzsimmons against Mr. Rosfeld’s defense attorney, Patrick Thomassey.
Mr. Fitzsimmons, who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1982, has one defendant on Pennsylvania’s death row. He prosecuted Anthony Fiebiger, who was convicted of killing two young women, one in 1982 on Mount Washington and another in 1990 in Carnegie.
Mr. Fitzsimmons is an active member of the Allegheny County Bar Association, has served on various committees and has been a member of the state Supreme Court’s procedural rules committee.