Category Archives: Zombies
Zombie Apocalypse: Miami Face Eating Attack: 911 Calls Released
NEW YORK) — Three frantic 911 calls reporting a brutal face-eating attack are shedding new light on the painful scene passersby witnessed.
“He’s beating another man. It’s a naked man beating another man,” one caller said. “He is going to kill that man. I promise you.”
The grisly assault on a homeless man whose face was eaten by a deranged assailant lasted for 18 agonizing minutes and was captured on nearby surveillance cameras. The 911 calls were releaed by police late Friday.
“He is beating another man to a pulp,” one caller said.
Another told police they would have no trouble finding the location.
“Can’t miss him, he’s naked!” the caller said.
Rudy Eugene, who authorities suspect may have been high on a dangerous new street drug known as “bath salts,” had to be shot four times by a police officer to halt the cannibalistic attack.
The victim, Ronald Poppo, 65, is in critical condition after police say 75 percent of his face was devoured by Eugene.
Footage taken by security cameras at the nearby Miami Herald building shows most of the 18 gory minutes of Eugene’s growling and vicious attack on Poppo, when Eugene ate the man’s nose, mouth and eyes.
A second cannibalistic attack occured later this week.
A 21-year-old man accused of killing a housemate told police in Harford County, Md., that he ate the victim’s heart and part of his brain after killing him.
Alexander Kinyua first became a suspect when his brother found what he thought were human remains in the basement of the family’s Joppatowne home. When the brother confronted Kinyua, he told him they were animal remains, according to ABC 2 News in Baltimore. The brother told the father about the grisly find, but when the father searched the basement the remains were gone.
OUR GOVERNMENT IS LYING – CDC denies rumors of zombie apocalypse
CDC denies rumors of zombie apocalypse
With reports of flesh-eating coming in from across the nation, rumors of a possible zombie outbreak are spreading on the Internet — but do you really have anything to worry about?
Photo: Nemanja Jovanovic/AFPTroubled 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.
How to Survive Miami’s Zombie Apocalypse, According to Zombie Expert Jonathan Maberry
According to authorities, there’s a good chance that last week’s face-eating incident was the result of mind-altering drugs. (Just say no, kids.)
But according to the rest of us, it may signal the beginning of an inevitable threat Hollywood has warned us about for years: a zombie apocalypse. (Just ask The Miami zombie.)
Naturally, we’re all a little concerned that the undead may choose our sunny paradise as their next city of smorgasbord. After all, the heat is nice and lubricating for their stiff limbs.
So, in the interest of being prepared, we spoke to zombie expert Jonathan Maberry, author of Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead on how best to survive a zombie apocalypse. Y’know, just in case.
Cultist: I’m sure you heard about the recent face-eating zombie attack in Miami. Any commentary?
Maberry: Within a few hours of the report hitting the news I was inundated by emails, IMs, Facebook and Twitter posts telling me, in essence, that the stuff I’ve been writing may not be fiction.
What would you say is the top rule of zombie survival?
Don’t be the dumb loudmouth in your group of survivors. These days, folks are likely to feed you to the zoms and make their escape during the chow-down.
What weapons or supplies should we procure to prepare ourselves?
In my series of teen post-apocalyptic zombie novels (Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay, etc.) the smartest object of defense isn’t a gun or knife — it’s body armor made from carpet. You can’t really bite through it and there’s carpet everywhere. In the movies, the characters always run out into a crowd of zoms wearing ordinary clothes. I’d tear up the carpet, secure it with some duct tape (and we all have duct tape), and then stroll through the crowd of frustrated zombies.
Can we ply them with any other food besides human flesh?
If we accept the movies of George Romero as “zombie canon,” then the living dead eat everything — humans, animals, insects. We can always breed food for them. And it would provide jobs for farmers in a troubled economy.
How do zombies react to hot weather?
Zombies would thrive in hot weather. The heat keeps them limber. Cold would freeze them solid since body heat comes from blood flow. Of course, as the temperature rises, the zoms would spoil pretty quickly. Smelly … but eventually they’d fall apart.
Can zombies swim?
Zombies wouldn’t be a threat in the water. The freshly killed ones would sink like a stone without air in their lungs for buoyancy. The rotting ones might float because of gasses released by putrefaction, but they would lack the coordination for the mechanics of swimming and couldn’t strategize on how to overcome tides and currents. So, a great way to survive the zombie apocalypse is to strap on that Speedo and take a dip.
Are there different varieties of zombie?
There are several classifications of zombies. The old-school zombies are the raised dead used as slaves by priests of the Haitian religion of vodou. Since the 1960s we’ve come to hang the “zombie” nickname on flesh-eating ghouls of the Romero kind, and these are slow-moving, mindless corpses. Then there are the fast zombies, as introduced first in the film Return of the Living Dead (1985) and made famous in the 2004 Zack Snyder remake of Dawn of the Dead. Then you have the “rage virus-infected,” who are mindless humans infected by a disease that makes them kill everyone they meet. They were first introduced in George Romero’s 1973 flick The Crazies, then later became wildly popular in Danny Boyle’s 2002 classic, 28 Days Later and the 2010 remake of The Crazies. Oh, and Europe is famous for its demonically possessed zombies, and there have been a zillion of those films.
What’s the most common misconception about zombies?
The most common misconception about zombies is that the disease only spreads through bites. However Romero established that everyone who dies, no matter how or why, will rise as a zombies. Bites simply make it happen faster.
So there you have it. Get ready to tear up that carpet and make a swim for it, Miami.