Friends mourn man killed outside Phillies game

David W. Sale Jr., the 22-year-old killed outside a Phillies game Saturday, had worked for a North Wales chemical company for a year and was a "good employee and friend of many people," the company says.

This weekend, the friends who remembered Sale as cheery and hard-partying will gather to bury him at a Souderton church.

"I'm never going to find anyone even close to him as a friend," said Dan Curran, 22, of Lansdale, who had Phillies season tickets with Sale.

The two, friends from their North Penn High School days, used to take road trips to Pittsburgh, attend country-music concerts, and share other adventures.

At McFadden's, a bar attached to Citizens Bank Park, Sale's group got into a brawl with a group from a Fishtown bar. Sale, who was stomped after ending up on the ground, later died at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Police said this week that Sale and his friends could have withdrawn from the fatal encounter but did not.

"They had the opportunity to leave," Lt. Phillip Riehl said. "It's not like they were necessarily walking away and saying, 'We don't want any trouble.' "

Three members of the Fishtown group have been charged in Sale's beating death: Francis Kirchner, 28; Charles Bowers, 35; and James Groves, 45.

Curran would not say whether he was at Saturday night's Phillies game with Sale on a bachelor-party outing. David Sale Sr. was with his son at the game and the hospital, Curran said.

The Sale family has asked not to be contacted and did not respond to an e-mail.

Sale Jr., who went by Dave, spent most of his life in Lansdale, where he and Curran still played on a softball team. Before taking a job at Colorcon in North Wales, Sale worked at the Best Buy store in Montgomery Township and on construction and landscaping jobs, and had talked about going to technical school.

Alcohol is prominent in several photos on his MySpace page. In August 2005, court records show, he was charged with DUI after a one-car wreck. He had a blood-alcohol level of 0.158, records show, and was sentenced to community service and 12 months of probation.

On his MySpace page, Sale identified himself as from "Killadelphia," and one photo appears to show markings of a backward swastika on his stomach beneath the words Thug Life.

Curran said Sale did not have a swastika tattoo and "was a Christian who carried the Holy Bible in his car." He said Sale might have been drawn on with a marker.

"That's absolutely not a tattoo," Curran said.

Online and in conversations, others described Sale as smiling and affable.

Curt Reichwein, 45, who taught Sale in an engineering class during the young man's senior year at North Penn, recalled "a little guy who had a big character" and an inherent honesty.

"David would cut my class and go to lunch, and I would write him up," Reichwein said. "Never once would he lie to me. He would give me a big wave in the hallway and say, 'What's up, Reichwein?' And I'd say, 'Nothing. How was lunch?' And he'd say, 'Extra long.' "