Category Archives: Zombie Survival
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.
New video shows more grisly details of ZOMBIE attack in Miami
New details of the horrific attack were captured in additional video footage taken by security cameras at the nearby Miami Herald building.
Rudy Eugene walked naked alongside the MacArthur Causeway before pouncing on a homeless man he found dozing in the shade of the elevated Metromover train tracks.
For almost 18 grisly minutes, Eugene savaged his victim, punching him and stripping the man’s pants before gnawing off the homeless man’s face — all as cars and cyclists rolled by on the busy causeway on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
The new details of the horrific attack were captured in additional video footage taken by security cameras at the nearby Miami Herald building.
At least five passersby, including a Road Ranger from the Florida Department of Transportation, called police to report what they saw of the macabre scene. Three bicyclists pedaled by the two bloody men in the minutes before the arrival of Miami police officer Jose Rivera, who shot and killed Eugene to end the attack, the new footage shows. The shooting itself was obstructed in the video, and the officer appeared to shoot Eugene within a minute of arriving.
On Tuesday police identified Eugene’s victim as Ronald Poppo, a 65-year-old homeless man who has lived on Miami’s streets for more than three decades. With his nose, mouth and eyes torn off, he remained in critical condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital on Tuesday.
The new video, and information from police, suggest that Eugene stumbled upon Poppo by sheer happenstance.
The footage shows Eugene walking naked on the sidewalk along the Biscayne Boulevard off-ramp of the causeway at around 1:55 p.m. Saturday when he paused in a shady spot under the Metromover Omni loop line. Eugene appeared to twirl as a bicyclist zoomed by. For about two minutes, Eugene bent over a second figure in the shade, though the images are obscured by a rustling palm frond.
Eugene then rolled Poppo out onto the sunny sidewalk, stripping off his clothes while Poppo appeared to kick in resistance. Eugene later appeared to straddle Poppo and hunch over him for several minutes.
Meanwhile, two more cyclists passed by, and one motorist in a white car slowed down while descending the off-ramp. But for many motorists, the scene was obscured by a waist-high concrete safety wall along the highway.
According to Miami police, the first call of a disturbance came from a passing motorist who reported seeing Eugene stripping off his clothes and acting erratically. That call was routed to the Florida Highway Patrol — it’s unclear why — and then transferred to the Miami police. Police have not disclosed the time of the first call.
A Road Ranger called to the scene also called 911 and used a loudspeaker to call for the naked attacker to cease. As the attack dragged on, two other motorists called police, as did another cyclist, Larry Vega, who later told reporters that Eugene “just stood, his head up like that, with pieces of flesh in his mouth. And he growled.”
At about 2:11 p.m. — 16 minutes after the attack began — a Miami police patrol car briefly turned up the causeway ramp, against traffic, before turning around, the video shows.
About two minutes later, the patrol car turned against traffic again and drove up the ramp to scene, just south of the Miami Herald’s parking garage. Just a few seconds after stepping from his car to confront the attacker, Officer Rivera drew his gun, but it’s unclear when he fired on Eugene, killing the 31-year-old man. A second officer arrived about one minute later.
Police have just begun to piece together Eugene’s actions in the hours before the attack.
It appears Eugene had been in Miami Beach — in full party mode for Urban Beach Week over the Memorial Day Weekend — shortly before the attack. Eugene’s car, a purple 1995 Chevrolet Caprice, was towed for being parked illegally at 1100 10th St.
The night before, Eugene had been with his girlfriend in Miami Gardens. She reported that he was acting strangely before leaving in his car. According to police, Eugene later called her to say that his car broke down.
Still unclear is what motivated the attack. Though some have speculated that Eugene was under the influence of some kind of stimulants or other drugs that sometimes cause violent episodes, police said they found no evidence of drugs or paraphernalia at the scene. Toxicology tests of Eugene’s blood will likely take several weeks.
Inside zombie brains: Sci-fi teaches science
- A new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” is about, well, zombies
- The zombie virus basically eats the brain down to the amygdala
- When it’s humans vs. zombies, the best solution is a strategic attack, mathematician says
Zombie author and expert Dr. Steven Schlozman will join us for a Twitter chat at 12:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, April 26. Tweet your questions to @cnnhealth and follow along at #cnnzombies.
(CNN) — An airborne virus is rapidly turning people into zombies. Two-thirds of humanity has been wiped out. Scientists desperately look for a cure, even as their own brains deteriorate and the disease robs them of what we consider life.
Relax, it’s only fiction — at least, for now. This apocalyptic scenario frames the new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” by Dr. Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist who holds positions at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Program in Child Psychiatry.
You might not expect someone with those credentials to take zombies seriously, but it turns out the undead are a great way to explore real-world health issues: why certain nasty diseases can destroy the brain, how global pandemics create chaos and fear, and what should be done about people infected with a highly contagious and incurable lethal illness.
“One of the things zombie novels do is they bring up all these existential concerns that happen in medicine all the time: How do you define what’s alive?” says Schlozman, who has been known to bounce between zombie fan conventions and academic meetings.
“When is it appropriate to say someone’s ‘as-good-as-dead,’ which is an awful, difficult decision?”
What a zombie virus would do to the brain
So maybe you’ve seen “Night of the Living Dead,” read “World War Z,” or can’t wait for the return of the AMC show “The Walking Dead,” but you probably don’t know what differentiates the brains of humans and zombies.
First things first: How does the zombie disease infect its victims? Many stories in the genre talk about biting, but Schlozman’s novel imagines a deliberately engineered virus whose particles can travel in the air and remain potent enough to jump from one person to another in a single sneeze.
Now, then, to the brain-eating. The zombie virus as Schlozman describes it basically gnaws the brain down to the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for the “fight or flight” response. The zombies always respond by fighting because another critical part of the brain, the ventromedial hypothalamus, which tells you when you’ve eaten enough, is broken.
The brain’s frontal lobes, responsible for problem-solving, are devoured by the virus, so zombies can’t make complex decisions. Impairment in the cerebellum means they can’t walk well, either. Also, these humanoids have an unexplained predilection for eating human flesh.
“The zombies in this book are stumbling, shambling, hungry as hell,” Schlozman said. “Basically they’re like drunk crocodiles; they’re not smart, they don’t know who you are or what you are.”
Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies
How a zombie virus would be made
So the bloodthirsty undead wander (or crawl) around spreading a lethal illness ominously called ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome, or ANSD, for short.
“When something really terrifying comes along, especially in medicine or that has a medical feel to it, we always give it initials. That’s the way we distance ourselves from it,” Schlozman said.
The virus has several brain-destroying components, one of which is a “prion,” meaning a protein like the one that causes mad cow disease. In real life, prions twist when they are in an acidic environment and become dangerous, Schlozman said. How our own environment has changed to make prions infectious — getting from the soil to the cows in mad cow disease, for instance — is still a mystery.
Now here’s something to send chills up your spine: In Schlozman’s world, airborne prions can be infectious, meaning mad cow disease and similar nervous-system destroyers could theoretically spread just like the flu. Swiss and German researchers recently found that mice that had only one minute of exposure to aerosols containing prions died of mad cow disease, as reported in the journal PLoS Pathogens. A follow-up described in Journal of the American Medical Association showed the same for a related disease that’s only found in animals called scrapie. Of course, these are mice in artificially controlled conditions in a laboratory, and humans do not exhale prions, but it could have implications for safety practices nonetheless.
Like mad cow disease, the zombie disease Schlozman describes also progresses in acidic environments. In the book, a major corporation doles out implantable meters that infuse the body with chemicals to artificially lower acidity when it gets too high. But, sadly, when acidity is too low, that also induces symptoms that mimic the zombie virus, so it’s not a longterm solution. Everyone who gets exposed eventually succumbs, Schlozman said.
As for the unknown component of the zombie disease that would help slowly zombifying researchers in their quest for a cure, that’s up for the reader to figure out — and the clues are all in the book, Schlozman said.
How we’d fight back
You can’t ethically round up fellow survivors to kick some zombie butt unless the undead have technically died. And in Schlozman’s book, a group of religious leaders get together and decide that when people reach stage four of the disease, they are basically dead. That, of course, permits zombie “deanimation,” or killing.
The ‘zombie theology’ behind the walking dead
And how do you kill a zombie? Much of zombie fiction knocks out zombies through shots to the head. That, Schlozman said, is because the brain stem governs the most basic functioning: breathing and heartbeat.
A zombie-apocalypse disease like the one he describes probably wouldn’t evolve on its own in the real world, he said.
But, as we’ve seen, individual symptoms of zombies do correspond to real ailments. And if they all came together, the disease would be creepily efficient at claiming bodies, Schlozman said.
Bad news, folks: Even if people contracted a zombie virus through bites, the odds of our survival aren’t great.
A mathematician at the University of Ottawa named Robert Smith? (who uses the question mark to distinguish himself from other Robert Smiths, of course), has calculated that if one zombie were introduced to a city of 500,000 people, after about seven days, every human would either be dead or a zombie.
“We’re in big, big trouble if this ever happens,” Smith? said. “We can kill the zombies a bit, but we’re not very good at killing zombies fundamentally. What tends to happen is: The zombies just win, and the more they win, the more they keep winning” because the disease spreads so rapidly.
The best solution is a strategic attack, rather than an “every man for himself” defense scenario, he said. It would take knowledge and intelligence, neither of which zombies have, to prevail.
Why study zombies?
In his day job, Smith? models how real infectious diseases spread. But he’s already reaped benefits from his work on zombies. For instance, while many mathematical models only deal with one complicated aspect of a situation at a time, he tackled two — zombie infection and zombie-killing — when it came to speculating about outbreaks.
When it came time for modeling of real-world human papillomavirus (HPV), then, Smith? felt equipped to handle many facets of it at the same time, such as heterosexual and homosexual transmission of HPV.
“Knowing what we knew from zombies allowed us to actually take on these more complicated models without fear,” he said.
Studying zombies is also a great way to get young people excited about science. Smith?, who was on a zombie-science panel with Schlozman through the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange in 2009, has also seen math-phobic people get interested in mathematics by reading about his work with zombies.
“There are insights that we gain from the movies, and from fiction, from fun popular culture stuff, that actually can really help us think about the way that science works, and also the way science is communicated,” he said.
And as to why people like reading about zombies and watching zombies so much, Schlozman points to the impersonal nature of things in our society, from waiting in line in the DMV to being placed on hold on a call with a health insurance company.
Think about all the situations in daily life where you sense a general lack of respect for humanity, and zombies make a little more sense.
“The zombies themselves represent a kind of commentary on modernity,” Schlozman says. “We’re increasingly disconnected. That might be the current appeal.”