Tag Archives: friends and family
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Zombies
Zombie survival guides are a blood-stained dime a dozen, but won’t somebody please 
think of the zombies? It’s a hard “life,” full of unending hunger, long monotonous stretches of boredom, a homogenous diet, and unceasing drool. Plus, you never get to change into a clean pair of underwear, and that’s just bad luck.
Well, I’m somebody—a yummy body to the zombies—and I’m happy to oblige. It seems fitting that I, man of alterity and otherness, would be considerate of the needs of zombies. You don’t get much more otherwise than they. So without further moaning, zombie-walk ado, I present seven habits of highly effective zombies.
- Get Involved in a Community – The lone wolf or isolated zombie is easily seen, easily avoided, and easily whacked. Join a mass of your fellow flesh-eaters and stay hidden. It offers you safety, strength in numbers, and a better chance of surrounding and getting your mouth on some of that living meat you so excitedly crave.
- Be Patient – Aristotle taught that virtue is a mean between excess and defect. When you’re in a group advancing on your prey, don’t rush to the front where you’ll be the first to fall, and don’t meander at the very back where you’ll never get your hands on even a multiply-stomped-on strip of intestine. You want to be close to the front, but biding your time. Wait for the frontline zombies to wear down the food. When it’s your turn to strike, your meal will be exhausted, out of bullets, and primed for you, the walking abattoir.
- Have Foresight – This habit is also important before you become a zombie. If you know you’re doomed to be dinner and maybe to life as a zombie, try to get bitten on a part of your body that won’t slow you down or handicap you later. Avoid bites on the leg. You’ll want mobility. The face is fine, but make sure you still have a working jaw. You can get by without an arm, but you’ll be a much more effective killer with all your appendages intact. I recommend guiding the gnawing jaw of a zombie to your chest or back.
- Keep Your Moaning to a Minimum – No sense in announcing your presence. If your voice box alerts your prey, rip it out. You’re a zombie; you can take the biblical injunction literally.
- Eat on the Run – Some zombies like to sit or crouch down to relax and enjoy their food. This is usually unwise. The living may be lurking, looking for distracted zombies to bash in the head. If you must sit, have your back against a wall, and eat with your head up and your eyes peeled. By the way, peeled eye is quite succulent if you can get your hands on some.
- Attack the Unarmed – This may seem a no brainer, but that’s part of your problem, isn’t it? Stay away from humans with guns, blades, bats, and other weapons. You may want to focus on anyone unarmed who could conceivably obtain a weapon and appears to have the knowhow to use it, but this approach obviously has its risks.
- Stalk Close Friends and Family – No one wants to shoot a spouse, parent, child, or good friend in the head. Take advantage of this momentary hesitation to go in for the kill. Beloved celebrities like Justin Bieber or Katy Perry should stalk their once adoring now delicious fans. On the flip side, avoid your enemies, and, if you were a horrible boss, your former employees. People lose their moral compass during a zombie apocalypse and won’t hesitate the blow the brains out of people they really hated if presented with the mere possibility that they’ve become zombies. In The Simpsons, Zombie Flanders learned this the hard way when approaching his neighbor Homer, who, after shooting his undead foe, remarked, “He was a zombie?”
So there you have it. Happy effective hunting!
MIAMI ZOMBIE – No Bath Salts, Only Marijuana Found In Face-Eater Toxicology Tests
It wasn’t bath salts.
According to a full toxicology report released Wednesday afternoon by the Miami-Dade medical examiner, the only drug detected in the lifeless body of infamous Miami face-chewer Rudy Eugene was marijuana.
“The department’s toxicology laboratory has identified the active components of marijuana,” the medical examiner said in a statement, according to NBC Miami. “The laboratory has tested for but not detected any other street drugs, alcohol or prescription drugs…This includes cocaine, LSD, amphetamines (Extasy, Meth and others), phencyclidine (PCP or Angel Dust), heroin, oxycodone, Xanax, synthetic marijuana (Spice), and many other similar compounds.”
CBS Miami reports that the medical examiner’s office sought the assistance of an “outside forensic toxicology reference laboratory” to help confirm the absence of common ingredients of bath salts, a synthetic amphetamine cocktail blamed inseveral recent incidents that bear some similarity to Eugene’s attack.
“Within the limits of current technology by both laboratories,” stated a press release from Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce Hyma, “marijuana is the only drug identified in the body of Mr. Rudy Eugene.”
The report did not address previously reported autopsy findings of what appeared to be undigested pills in Eugene’s stomach, according to the Miami Herald, and an expert told the Associate Press marijuana alone was not likely to cause such an attack.
“The problem today is that there is an almost an infinite number of chemical substances out there that can trigger unusual behavior,” said Dr. Bruce Goldberger, Professor and Director of Toxicology at the University of Florida.Goldberger said that the medical examiner’s office in Miami is known for doing thorough work and that he’s confident they and the independent lab covered as much ground as possible. But it’s nearly impossible for toxicology testing to keep pace with new formulations of synthetic drugs.
“There are many of these synthetic drugs that we currently don’t have the methodology to test on, and that is not the fault of the toxicology lab. The challenge today for the toxicology lab is to stay on top of these new chemicals and develop methodologies for them, but it’s very difficult and very expensive.” Goldberger said. “There is no one test or combination of tests that can detect every possible substance out there.”
The medical examiner’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Eugene, 31, was widely speculated to have been on some form of synthetic drugs or suffering a drug-induced psychosis the afternoon of May 26 when he stripped naked and brutally attacked homeless resident Ronald Poppo in broad daylight along Miami’s busy MacArthur Causeway, chewing and ripping off roughly half of the older man’s face.
A police officer responding to multiple 911 calls shot and killed Eugene as he crouched over Poppo, reportedly refusing to stop the gruesome assault by growling at the officer with Poppo’s flesh in his mouth.
The 18-minute attack and its aftermath were captured on surveillance video from the Miami Herald’s parking garage, but it is still unknown what prompted Eugene to commit such a horrific crime.
According to Local10, the former North Miami Beach High School football player was once diagnosed as schizophrenic after an arrest, but authorities are not sure if he ever sought treatment.
Records show Eugene had been arrested 8 times since the age of 16, including 4 instances involving marijuana. But though he was once accused of threatening to kill his mother, friends and family members alike say they never expected such violence from Eugene, who was participating in a Bible study, reading the Koran, and telling friends he wanted to stop smoking marijuana.
“There’s no answer for it, not really,” Eugene’s younger brother, Marckenson Charles, told the AP. “Anybody who knew him knows this wasn’t the person we knew him to be. Whatever triggered him, there is no answer for this.”
Poppo, meanwhile, is doing “well,” according to doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center. The 65-year-old has lost one eye, is missing his nose, and faces a string of surgeries to repair his wounds and reconstruct his face.
“We have mental health professionals to help him with the coping, and he’s coping remarkably well,” said plastic surgeon Dr. Wrood Kassira.
This is a developing story.
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.