Category Archives: Zombies
‘Zombie apocalypse’ trending as bad news spreads quickly
The term “zombie apocalypse” has been lighting up the internet all week and has been among the top Google trends Friday morning.
On the Web’s Urban Dictionary, here’s definition No. 4 of zombie apocalypse: “The End of the World, when people who have died rise again in rotten corpses searching for blood and brains to strengthen them.”
While we’re certain the dead are not rising, the past week has seen some of the most disturbing instances of human behavior imaginable.
A man in Miami happens upon a homeless man on the sidewalk and chews off 75% of his face in an 18-minute attack. The attacker’s mother later says her son is not a zombie as portrayed in the media.
Authorities in Canada have launched a massive manhunt for a suspect after a severed hand was sent to Canada’s Liberal Party, a foot to the Conservatives and a torso was stuffed in a suitcase and tossed in the trash of the Montreal apartment building where he lived.
A Maryland man admits to killing his housemate, cutting him up, then eating his heart and part of his brain.
A New Jersey man rips his torso open and throws bits of his intestines at police,according to the Bergen Record.
There have been other equally grisly crimes, but there’s no need to dwell on them.
Fact is, horrible crimes happen all the time.
“This is all nothing new,” said Scott Talan, professor of public communication at American University, with a long work history in public relations and the media.
Bad news attracts attention, he said, and when it happens in bunches, people like to attach a name to it, hence, “zombie apocalypse.”
People also like to see others in bigger trouble than they have themselves, Talan said.
“No matter how your life’s going, someone’s got it worse,” he said.
We like to think, “I’m better off than these people,” he said.
And that’s nothing new, Talan said, pointing out that ancient Roman philosophers used to lament that citizens felt little for the gladiators and what happened in their gruesome contests.
But he said while these stories catch fire quickly in our wired world, they flame out quickly, too.
Unless there’s another gruesome crime today, expect the zombie apocalypse to be done by next week, he said.
Even if that’s the case, there may be some good that can come of the attention zombie apocalypse has drawn on the Web.
A year ago, when zombie movies were the rage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said if it could convince the public to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, maybe they’d be better prepared for disasters more likely to affect their lives, like earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, or a major pandemic.
Or maybe the Mayan apocalypse. Talan points out that it isn’t real, it’s just a name like zombie apocalypse.
But then again, that isn’t supposed to happen until December. There’s still time for that go viral again.
Zombie apocalypse: NJ incident causes SWAT team to decontaminate from gore
Another zombie apocalypse-type incident took place in Hackensack, New Jersey over the weekend, with details surfacing today. Police broke down the door and tried to subdue the man, but they retreated and had the SWAT Team go in. This scene was so gory, that the SWAT team needed to go through decontamination because of all the blood.
Wayne Carter, 43, barricaded himself in his bedroom and started stabbing himself with a 12 inch knife. The deep stab wounds in his abdomen caused his intestines to squeeze out through the wounds. When the SWAT team came through the door, he started throwing pieces of his intestines and flesh at the officers, according to South Coast Today.
The police used two cans of pepper spray on Carter, but it was like he felt nothing and continued stabbing himself. It is unknown what caused Carter to behave this way. An unknown person called 911 to report that Carter had barricaded himself in his room with a knife and was intending to hurt himself. This was the call that set the ball rolling. Carter is in the hospital in critical condition.
Carter had at least 50 self-inflicted stab wounds all over his body and it didn’t appear to bother him at all. This is the second such incident reported this weekend, with the first happening in Miami. Rudy Eugene was found naked and eating the face of a homeless man in broad daylight on a highway off-ramp. When an officer ordered Eugene away from the man, he growled and continued to chew on the victim, according to SMSEO.
When the officer shot him, this still didn’t stop Eugene from eating the flesh of his victim. This left the officer no choice but to continue shooting him until he was dead. The 64 year-old victim, Ronald Poppo, had 80% of his face eaten by Eugene and he is in critical condition in an area hospital today.
See the pictures of the victim and the crime aftermath here on SMSEO.
Both of these two men demonstrated behavior that is not something the people who know them have seen before. Both men showed an unusual tolerance to pain, with one being able to pull out his own intestines and the other being shot without stopping his attack.
Is this some type of new drug that is putting people in such a state of psychosis that they don’t respond to excruciating pain? Conspiracy theories take this as a sign that the zombie apocalypse is beginning. Do you agree or do you think they’ve watched too many episodes of the “Walking Dead?”
Zombie apocalypse outbreak spreading?
A second grisly zombie-like incident, this time in New Jersey. A 43-year-old man named Wayne Carter stabbed himself 50 times. Then when a SWAT team arrived Carter began throwing his intestines at them. He is now in a hospital. Combined with the recent Miami face-eater, Patrick Jones wonders if bath salts and insanity is the kick off of the zombie apocalypse. Watch the video report at the bottom of this column.
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.
Another Zombie Outbreak – Maryland man charged with killing, eating man’s brain, heart
A 21-year-old Morgan State University student told investigators that he ate the heart and portions of the brain of a man whose dismembered remains were found in his Joppa home, according to a grisly account from the Harford County Sheriff’s Office.
The arrest of Alexander Kinyua came almost a week after Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, went missing, and followed a search of the home the two men apparently shared in the 500 block of Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne early Wednesday morning, police said.
Kinyua, an electrical engineering student who until January was involved in the ROTC program at Morgan, was ordered held without bail at a court appearance Thursday afternoon.
Monica Worrell, a spokeswoman for the Harford County Sheriff’s Office, said today that Agyei-Kodie had been reported missing, but information collected by detectives “didn’t pass the smell test.” On Monday, police released a public appeal for help in locating him.
Late Tuesday night, Antony Kinyua, notified police that his son, Kinyua’s brother, had found what they believed were human remains in the basement of the house, according to charging documents. Upon their arrival, Jarrod Kinyua told police he found a human head and two human hands inside metal tins, under a blanket in the laundry room.
When he asked Alexander Kinyua about the remains, Jarrod Kinyua said his brother denied that they were human and said they were animal remains, according to charging documents. After calling his father, Antony Kinyua, downstairs, the pair discovered the remains had been moved and Alexander Kinyua was washing out the metal tins.
With a search and seizure warrant for the location, deputies were able to locate the head and hands on the main floor of the house, according to charging documents. They also interviewed Alexander Kinyua, who allegedly admitted that he had killed Agyei-Kodie by cutting him up with a knife and afterward, ingested his heart and portions of his brain.
Kinyua also directed police to Towne Baptist Church, in the 500 block of Trimble Road, to find the rest of the remains, which were found in a Dumpster on the property, according to charging documents.
The case comes on the heels of shocking incidents in cities like Miami, where a naked man believed to be high on bath salts ate another man’s face, and New Jersey, where a man disemboweled himself and reportedly threw his intestines at police officers. Police there say they aren’t sure whether the man, Wayne Carter, was on drugs or suffering from mental illness.
At his first court appearance, defense attorney Lynne McChrystal requested that reasonable bail to be set in the case, adding that Kinyua has been in Harford County for six years and in Marylandfor nine years. He is self-employed and performs consulting work, she added.
Upon questioning by Judge John L. Dunnigan, Kinyua said that all of his family members resided in Maryland and he was originally from Nairobi, Kenya.
Assistant State’s Attorney Trenna Manners cited those out-of-country ties, as well as the “grisly” nature of the crime, when she asked for Kinyua to be held without bail.
The charges are not Kinyua’s first in recent weeks, and a previous arrest and Kinyua’s online postings point to a troubled man. In January, he was disenrolled from the ROTC program after two-and-a-half-years of participation, said Lt. Col. James Lewis, a professor of military service who oversees the program. Officials said it followed a disciplinary incident.
Then on May 20, Kinyua, who otherwise does not have a criminal record in Maryland, was charged with first-degree assault and reckless endangerment in Baltimore in connection with an incident that allegedly occurred May 19 at the Thurgood Marshallapartments, according to court records.
In that case, according to police, Kinyua “randomly” attacked another Morgan State student in a doorway of the apartment complex with a baseball bat, then fled into a nearby wooded area. The victim, listed as Joshua Ceasar, suffered fractures to his skull, arm, shoulder, as well as blindness to his left eye. The first responding officer saw Ceasar stumbling toward her, with blood coming from his forehead, and the officer noted a large amount of blood in the doorway.
Kinyua was ordered held on $220,000 bond in that case, and university officials said the school was in the process of expelling him.
On May 25, what appeared to be a plea from his parents for help paying Kinyua’s legal fees in the case from was posted on the website Mwakilishi.com, a Kenyan news site. The post, which has since been removed, said Kinyua had been arrested for “being involved in a fight in his dormitory room at Morgan State University.”
The online plea says, “In order to get him the best defense possible, we need to secure an attorney who will take his case and leave no stone unturned.”
It also states a fundraising event was scheduled at the International Christian Community Church on Sunday. He was scheduled to appear at a preliminary hearing in that case June 19.
In the days prior to the arrest, he had posted several strange messages on his Facebook page, in all capital letters. In two of the posts, he uploaded “QR Codes,” bar code images that when scanned with a smart phone lead to a web page. They both led to the following message about the “destruction of the black family”:
“PROJECT CRACK CODE COUNTERING THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN FAMILY SPREAD THE MESSAGE OF CREATION SUPPORT CRACK TEAM STAY TUNED FOR MORE INFORMATION ON SURVIVAL OF THE HUMAN FAMILY.”
In another, he wrote about campus shootings and “death cults”:
“HEAR ME OUT HBCU’ERS: ARE YOU STRONG ENOUGH TO ENDURE RITUAL HBCU MASS HUMAN SACRIFICES AROUND THE COUNTRY AND STILL BE ABLE TO FUNCTION AS HUMAN BEINGS? IT’S BEEN ALL TOO TRAGIC WITH THE DUAL UNIVERSITY SHOOTINGS AT VIRGINIA TECH, AND OTHER PAST UNIVERSITY KILLINGS ACROSS THE COUNTRY. NOW FOR A TWIST: ETHNIC CLEANSING IS THE POLICY, STRATEGY AND TACTICS THAT WILL AFFECT YOU, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY IN THE COMING MONTHS. THIS IS THE BRUTAL BASIS, AN EVIL & TERRIFYING METHOD OF THIS DEATH CULTS.”
Jasmine Bloomfield said Kinyua was known around campus – “he was always all around campus involved with things” – but often acted strangely. He was “always in his own little world, preaching everywhere he went and talking about how he was writing a book.” Once, she said, he got up during a screening of a documentary and started yelling about the struggle of black people.
But his page also shows Kinyua in the fall smiling at a campus event for student organizations, showing off a jacket for the National Society of Pershing Rifles, which according to its website is a fraternity for students in Reserve Office Training Corps program.
Late Wednesday, a man who answered a phone at the number listed said Antony and Beatrice Kinyua were “resting,” and that the family did not wish to speak to the media without an attorney present.