Category Archives: Doomsday
Troubled lives clashed in ‘Miami zombie’ face-eating attack
MIAMI — Saturday’s horror-movie episode on Miami’s MacArthur Causeway brought together two troubled men, one who was struggling to get his life on track, another who’d given up trying.
Rudy Eugene, 31, had been seeking spiritual guidance in Scripture. On May 24, two days before he would viciously attack a homeless man named Ronald Edward Poppo, Eugene attended a Bible-study session at a friend’s North Miami Beach home.
Recently, Eugene posted a verse from Psalm 59 on his Facebook page: “Deliver me from my enemies, O my Lord; Defend me from those who rise up against me. For the Lord God is my defense. …”
Friend Bobby Chery said he, Eugene and another friend discussed that day what they could do to become better men according to the word of God, and that Eugene vowed to give up marijuana.
That same Thursday, Miami Police rousted Poppo from one of the last places he called home: the top floor of the parking garage at Jungle Island, the Watson Island botanical and wildlife attraction.
Outreach workers from the Miami Homeless Assistance Program found him there and offered help, said Ronald Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust.
But after Poppo became “belligerent and aggressive,” the outreach team called police. Officers issued Poppo, who had turned 65 a week earlier, a “trespassing after warning” citation.
“He grabbed his box of stuff and went off,” said Book. Outreach workers reported he was “cursing and claiming discrimination.”
About 2 p.m. on Saturday, a naked Rudy Eugene grabbed Poppo near the causeway’s west end, stripped off his clothes, beat him, bit him, and gnawed off his face.
More than 15 minutes into the attack, a police officer arrived and shot Eugene to death. Poppo remains in critical condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center.
The crazed assault shocked nearly everyone who knew Eugene.
Johansen Aurelus, a childhood friend, called Eugene “preacher” because he liked sharing Bible verses with friends and kept his Bible handy.
Aurelus attended Bethel Baptist Church with Eugene when they were teens. Back then, Aurelus said, Eugene would ask questions about the pastor’s sermons and how they applied to his life.
Over the years Rudy had some run-ins with the police for marijuana possession and a domestic dispute. Most recently, he had difficulty holding a job, friends say.
Eugene’s stepfather, Melimon Charles, of North Miami, said that Eugene “is not the kind of devil who goes out and kill people like they are showing on the news. He’s a fine boy. He was raised in the church. He was in the choir.”
Trouble may have started about the time Eugene learned Melimon was not his biological father, in ninth or tenth grade, although Melimon had been with Eugene’s mom Ruth since the boy was 2.
Rudy “was angry because he was looking for his father,” Charles said. “His father passed away and he didn’t know. And I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even have a picture to show him.”
Soon after, he said, Eugene accepted “the truth and we were doing fine.”
But at 17, Eugene moved out of his home, without telling his stepfather. He transferred from North Miami Beach High School to North Miami High.
If he was upset over “family issues,” it was because of his parents’ divorce, which happened after he was an adult, Charles said.
Charles dismisses gossip that Rudy was the target of a voodoo curse.
“Nobody went to Haiti and did anything to him,” he insisted.
Though Eugene had stopped attending church regularly, he maintained his quest for spirituality. He regularly sent inspirational text messages to his friends. And on Facebook, he mentions “Zoe Life” several times — a phrase both associated with Haitian life and with born-again Christians.
His final post, on May 18, proclaimed: “ZOE LIFE IS ETERNAL!!!!!!!!!”
Friends posted tributes on his page.
“Damn, I still can’t believe it, out of all people, YOU! You have been a great friend to me, and for that you will always be missed!” said Meli Mel Rivera.
Ranessia Rollins posted that Eugene was at her house on Friday and kissed her cheek.
All of his friends expressed disbelief and solidarity.
Pudding Sabali said: “They’re telling me (us) that we shouldn’t have any grief for you dying. But it’s hard to not have the deepest warm feeling when it comes to you … just a young man misunderstood … God have mercy on your soul.”
Understanding Ronald Poppo is harder because he lived anonymously for so long.
Ron Book said that outreach workers had been offering him services since Dec. 27, 1999. At the time, he said he hadn’t lived at a permanent address since 1970.
Poppo said he’d become homeless outside of Florida, slept on Watson Island and abused alcohol.
He stayed in an emergency shelter for 141 days, during which he saw a counselor once, according to assistance program records.
Four years later, Miami police took him back to the shelter. Starting on Oct. 6, 2003, Poppo stayed for 10 days, and again met once with a counselor.
Between that stay and his last encounter with outreach workers on May 24th, Poppo may have spent less than a week living inside.
Records show he stayed twice at Camillus House in 2004, on Jan. 26 and July 20, and once at the Homeless Assistance Center on Nov. 16. His last stay: Jan. 23, 2005, under a cold weather sheltering program.
On Nov. 11, 2004, some kind of “mental crisis” brought him to Jackson’s crisis intervention unit, but an assistance program report is unclear about whether he stayed overnight.
Outreach teams approached him three times in 2005 and 2006, but he refused help.
“During one of the contacts he became angry and started throwing rocks at the outreach staff,” Book said.
Among Miami’s 240 to 260 chronic homeless people, “sometimes after three, 10, 30 attempts, we get a guy or woman to come in,” Book said. “There are people for different reasons, it takes them that long, maybe never, to get off the streets.”
Details of Poppo’s life have been surfacing in bits since the assault. The 1964 graduate of New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School grew up in Brooklyn, according to long-lost sister Antoinette Poppo.
Neither she nor Poppo’s two brothers have seen him in more than 30 years, she said, and none of them plan a trip to Miami. Two siblings live in New York, another in California.
Their late father was a shipfitter, she said, a structural worker in a shipyard. She believes that “Ronnie” attended both parents’ funerals.
She couldn’t explain the conditions that led to her brother’s downward spiral and his estrangement from the family.
“I’m 12 years older,” she said. “He was 6 years old when I got married and left the house.”
But she called him “a very intelligent boy and a gentle person.”
For a time in the late ’80s, Poppo worked as a roadie for the band SKUM, which spent about two years in Miami before breaking up around 1990.
They’re reuniting for a documentary, said former lead singer Hart Baur, of Miami. He said that part of the band’s philosophy was to hire homeless guys to carry equipment.
In an email from North Carolina, former bass player Patrick Burke, a former Miamian, said band members would see “homeless guys panhandling, so we’d take them to Burger King, and say, ‘You want to work, take out the garbage and sweep up the parking lot?’ ”
They’d give them a few bucks, booze and dinner.
There were moments of lucidity with Poppo, whom he called Ernie, “because I thought he looked like Ernest Hemingway,” Burke said.
Other band members called him Pops, Burke said, because he looked old.
Poppo was hanging out “under a bridge off Biscayne Boulevard” when the band met him, Burke said. “He loved to drink and we used to always kid him about the fact that homeless people always had the best heads of hair. Pops used to say, “It’s just the lifestyle, man — no bad chemicals on my head.”‘
He was always wearing a Yankee cap, Burke said, “and he would take it off to show his locks to the girls at our shows. … Last time I saw him was at the Grove Cinema in 1989.”
On Thursday, the Jackson Memorial Foundation established a fund for Poppo’s care. Foundation spokesman Larry Clark said that “inquiries have come from all over the country.”
Donations can be made on the foundation’s website, www.jmf.org (click the “Take Action Now” tab, and then click on donations. On the donation page, select “other” in the Contribution Details section and write in “Ronald Poppo”).
Donations by check should be sent to Jackson Memorial Foundation, Park Plaza East, Suite G, 901 N.W. 17th Street, Miami, FL 33136.; write “Ronald Poppo” on the memo line.
The dangers of bragging about your zombie defense preparation
You are prepared for the zombie apocalypse.
You’ve stocked up on canned goods and ammunition. Your fortified treehouse is built high in the Rocky Mountains. You’re an expert marksman proficient in several different kinds of firearms. You’ve got your pilot license, your Wilderness EMT training, your black belt in Judo, and you’ve won the blue ribbon at the county fair three years running for your green thumb. You know how to make a weapon out of three paperclips and a crumpled Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrapper, and you can survive on nothing but tree bark and fingernail clippings for weeks.
You, sir or madam, are prepared for the day when the dead replace the living as the dominant species on Earth and theBRAAAAINS hit the fan. But that doesn’t mean you need to advertise the fact.
It might be tempting to brag to all your friends and neighbors (the ones you haven’t carefully selected as your zombie apocalypse companions for their special skills and ability to remain calm in the face of gruesome death) about how ready you are for the eventuality of zombies. But you must resist the temptation.
Those same people who consider you their “crazy zombie-obsessed friend” today will turn to you for help when the need arises. And when the need arises, corpses will be feasting on the living in the streets and society will face a swift and brutal collapse, so it’s fair to say that those less prepared than you will not be at their most rational or diplomatic.
Being burdened with several unprepared would-be survivors could spell doom for any meticulously planned survival strategy. These are the people who considered your little zombie fixation an “adorable quirk” and tolerated your defense preparations because you were their friend. They have done nothing on their own to make them a valuable asset in the post-zombiepocalyptic world. And they will drag you down.
At the first sign (Or maybe the second or third, since let’s face it: People tend to resist the most obvious explanation) of a zombie outbreak, these acquaintances will come running to you for help. They won’t know that they are merely zombie fodder waiting to happen, but you will. You cannot let them slow you down.
So keep your zombie defense preparations to yourself as much as possible. Don’t go bragging about how you’ll be living large on SPAM for years while they’re shambling about munching on carrion… and being carrion. It might feel good to boast now, but when that government experiment goes awry and corpses start clawing their way up from the grave, you don’t want to be saddled with a bunch of under-prepared dead weight.
Unless you like the idea of using bait, that is.
Stay informed, stay alive: What are some of your zombie defense preparations? Don’t worry, I won’t tell those pesky neighbors who laugh at you for your underground bunker now but will be moaning and shambling about your yard a minute after the first sign of a zombie outbreak.
Girlfriend: ‘Miami Zombie’ may have had voodoo spell that made him chew off a man’s face
On the Saturday morning before he would make headlines for chewing off a man’s face — before he would come to be known tragically as the “Miami Zombie” — Rudy Eugene held his Bible and kissed his girlfriend goodbye.
Eugene’s on-again, off-again girlfriend said he woke her up at 5:30 a.m. to say he was going to meet with a “homeboy.” She said she found it strange he was rummaging the closet so early in morning. He didn’t name the friend or say where he was going.
He planted a kiss on her lips and said, “I love you.”
Shortly after, he left the central Broward apartment he shared with her.
“I told him be safe and I love you too. When he walked out the door I closed it, locked it and went back to sleep,” said the girlfriend, who spoke to theMiami Herald on Wednesday but asked that her name not be disclosed. She said that she thought it unusual that he was leaving the house so early, but didn’t press him on it.
An hour after he left, Eugene called her cellphone. “He called me and told me his car broke down. He said, ‘I’ll be home, but I’m going to be a little late.’ Then he said, ‘I’m going to call you right back.’ ” That was the last time Eugene’s girlfriend heard from him.
Around noon Saturday, she said she felt uneasy. She got into her car to search for Eugene, thinking he might still be stranded somewhere. She drove through North Miami and Miami Gardens, familiar neighborhoods Eugene frequented to visit with friends and family.
“I was worried. I couldn’t do anything. I just kept calling the phone,” she said. “I left messages saying, ‘Rudy, call me, I’m really worried.’ ”
She said Eugene never told her where he was going that morning, and she was surprised to hear reports that he’d been in South Beach in the hours before he attacked a homeless man, Ronald Poppo.
As a matter of fact, she said, the previous day he told her he didn’t want to go to South Beach because of the heavy police presence for Urban Beach Week. Eugene, who had been arrested in the past for possession of marijuana, told her he didn’t want to get arrested.
By Saturday evening she still had not heard from the man she calls “my baby, my heart.” She turned on the TV to watch the late-night news and heard an unreal story: A nude man near the Miami Heraldbuilding pounced on a homeless man, chewing off his face. The man with pieces of flesh hanging from his teeth was shot dead by police.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, that’s crazy,’ she said. “I didn’t know that it was Rudy.”
All day Sunday she placed phone calls to friends asking if they’d seen Eugene and again she searched North Dade streets for her boyfriend.
At 11 a.m. Monday she got the call from a member of Eugene’s family.
The caller shouted terrible news into the phone: “Rudy’s dead, Rudy’s dead.”
“I immediately started to scream,” she said. “I don’t know when I hung up the phone, I was hysterical.”
But it was not until the afternoon, when she left her home to grieve with the rest of Eugene’s family in North Miami Beach, that she heard even worse news: The man everyone was calling the Miami Zombie was her boyfriend.
Her reaction: Utter disbelief. “That’s not Rudy, that’s not Rudy,” she remembered saying aloud in shock.
“I’ll never be the same,” she said.
The man being depicted by the media as a “face eater” or a “monster” is not the man she knew, she said. He smoked marijuana often, though had recently said he wanted to quit, but he didn’t use stronger recreational drugs and even refused to take over-the-counter medication for simple ailments like headaches, she said. He was sweet and well-mannered, she said.
Eugene’s girlfriend has her own theory on what happened that day. She believes Eugene was drugged unknowingly. The only other explanation, she said, was supernatural — that someone put a voodoo curse on him. The girlfriend, who unlike Eugene is not Haitian, said she has never believed in voodoo, until now.
“I don’t know how else to explain this,” she said.
She and Eugene met in 2007. While in traffic on a Miami street, Eugene pulled up next to her car and motioned for her to roll down her window.
She did. “I thought he was cute. I shouted out my number to him and he called me right then. We clicked immediately.”
Their five-year relationship hit rocky points over the years, and they would separate for months at a time, then reunite again. She said their problems were mostly “communication issues.”
She said Eugene worked at a car wash and wanted to own his own business someday.
During their time together, she said, Eugene would sit on the bed or on the couch in the evenings with her to read from his Bible. He carried it with him just about everywhere he went, she said, and often cited verses to friends and family.
“If someone was lost or didn’t know God, he would tell them about him,” she said. “He was a believer of God.”
She cries often, she said. Eugene’s clothes and shoes are still in her closet.
“Something happened out of the ordinary that day. I don’t want him to be labeled the ‘Miami Zombie,’ ” she said. “He was a person. I don’t want him to go down like that.”
He was never violent around her, she said.
But according to police records, Eugene became violent at least once in his past and was arrested on battery charges. In 2004, he threatened his mother and smashed furniture during a domestic dispute, according to records from the North Miami Beach Police Department.
The police report says Eugene “took a fighting stand, balled his hands into a fist” and threatened one of the officers who responded.
Police had to use a Taser to subdue him. “Thank God you’re here, he would have killed me,” Eugene’s mother, Ruth Charles, told officers, the police report says. She told the officers that before they arrived, her son had told her, “I’ll put a gun to your head and kill you.”
On Wednesday, Charles said that despite the incident, she and her son had a warm relationship.
“I’m his first love … he’s a nice kid … he was not a delinquent,” she told Miami Herald news partner CBS-4 at her Miami Gardens home.
Charles told the station she was speaking up for the first time to defend her dead son.
“Everybody says that he was a zombie, but I know he’s not a zombie; he’s my son,” she said.
She said the man who ate another human being’s face was just not the son she knew.
“I don’t know what they injected in him to turn him into the person who did what he did,” she said, making the motion of someone putting a syringe into the crook of her arm.
A friend of Eugene’s since they were teenagers told the Herald on Wednesday that Eugene had been troubled in recent years.
Joe Aurelus said Eugene told him he wanted to stop smoking pot, and that friends were texting Eugene Bible verses.
“I was just with him two weeks ago,”‘ he said. They were at a friend’s house watching a movie and Eugene had a Bible in his hand.
“He was going through a lot with his family,” Aurelus said, and jumping from job to job.
“Rudy was battling the devil.”
Miami Herald staff writers Elinor J. Brecher and Scott Hiaasen contributed to this report.
THE END IS NEAR – H.R. 347 Makes Free Speech A Felony
Once signed, HR 347 will empower federal agents to arrest and bring felony criminal charges against citizens engaged in political protests anywhere in the USA.
OUTLAWING THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT: HR 347 MAKES FREE SPEECH A FELONY
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America reads as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
At 7:03pm ET on Tuesday, 28 February 2012, our 112th Congress violated this covenant with the American people by voting 399 to 3 in favor of H.R. 347, a bill which breezed through the Senate with unanimous consent and now lacks only corporate fascist puppet President Barack Obama’s signature to become law. The three patriots who voted Nay were Paul Broun (R-GA-10), Justin Amash (R-MI-3) and Ron Paul (R-TX-14). The traitors who voted Yea are listed here:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2011-149
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Euphemistically titled the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act” and referred to by our corporate-controlled mainstream media as a “non-controversial bill”, a more truthful moniker for HR 347 would be the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act”. As Representative Amash lamented on his Facebook page:
“Current law makes it illegal to enter or remain in an area where certain government officials (more particularly, those with Secret Service protection) will be visiting temporarily if and only if the person knows it’s illegal to enter the restricted area but does so anyway. [H.R. 347] expands current law to make it a crime to enter or remain in an area where an official is visiting even if the person does not know it’s illegal to be in that area and has no reason to suspect it’s illegal… [And to] show you the extent to which the public is misled and misinformed about the legislation we are voting on, read one prominent media outlet’s coverage of the same bill: http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/212873-house-approves-white-house-trespass-bill-sends-to-obama The report mischaracterizes not only current law but also the changes proposed by the bill.”
The full text of H.R. 347 is available here:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-347
Obviously aimed at the Occupy Movement, these modifications to U.S. Code Title 18 Section 1752 will seriously diminish the right of American citizens to petition their Government for a redress of grievances by outlawing protests where key government officials or other VIP’s may be nearby. Federal law enforcement agents will be empowered to bring these charges against Americans engaged in political protests anywhere in the country, and violators will face criminal penalties that include imprisonment for up to 10 years.
Welcome to Fourth Reich Amerika…
