Tag Archives: girlfriend
Bath salt zombies scare cadets straight in Navy-produced video
The Navy has a new weapon in its arsenal against designer drug abuse: the mini-movie Bath Salts: It’s Not a Fad, It’s a Nightmare.
Available to the public on YouTube (and at the bottom of this page), the 6:37 minute movie uses horror-movie style special effects to simulate the hallucinogenic and often violent effects of the drug.
Shot from a young sailor’s point of view, the first 2 minutes of the video put the viewer behind the eyes of a cadet as he smacks his girlfriend in a bowling alley, witnesses his roommate morph into a horrific demon, and ultimately ends up convulsing on a hospital bed as he is held down by camouflage-wearing doctors.
According to Lieutenant George Loeffler, Chief Psychiatry Resident at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, treatment centers within the armed forces are seeing more cases of bath salt abuse every month. In early 2012, the Navy announced an “alarming increase” in designer drug use, which led to 1515 sailors being discharged in 2011 alone according to the Navy-run Jet Observer.
Mr. Loeffler explained that paranoid delusions and psychotic episodes that last long after the drug is out of their systems. “When people are using bath salts, they’re not their normal selves. They’re angrier, they’re erratic, they’re violent, they’re unpredictable.”
“People will start acting really weird, seeing things that aren’t there, believing things that aren’t true,” Loeffler continued. “Some people describe people spying on them, trying to kill them and their families, other people talk about seeing demons, and things that are trying to kill them.”
The designer drug has the potential to cause permanent damage. “One of the most concerning things about bath salts is that these hallucinations, these paranoid delusions, will last long after the intoxication’s gone,” Loeffler says.
Similar to the designer drug spice—the synthetic version of marijuana until recently sold over the counter in tobacco shops—bath salts contain unknown ingredients which vary widely depending on the source. This makes experimenting with the drug essentially a game of Russian roulette, often with devastating effects.
Reports of a 31-year-old man named Rudy Eugene attacking a 65-year old homeless man in Miami, stripping off the victim’s clothes, and proceeding to eat his face recently brought national attention to the potential dangers involved with bath salts.
It later turned out that Mr. Eugene was not in fact using the synthetic drug, though the psychotic episodes and paranoid delusions experienced by the assailant are consistent with known side effects.
The military treats soldiers who test positive for drug use with a strict “zero tolerance”, and are increasingly able to detect many designer drugs. Many of the most dangerous chemicals, however, do not register on drug tests, according to Mr. Loeffler. This fact has been used specifically to market the drug to sailors, soldiers, and marines.
Are the Navy’s methods to discourage bath salt use excessively dramatic in their recent video, or appropriate to counter an increasingly threatening epidemic of designer drug abuse?
Decide for yourself after watching the video:
10 Essentials for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: A Practical Guide
In many ways, vampires and zombies are two sides to the same coin. Both are undead. Both spread their condition through bites. Both have specific methods in which they can be killed. But vampires are the patricians of the undead with fussy European accents, bright sparkly skin, cheerleader girlfriends, tailored suits, and slinky party dresses. Zombies, on the other hand, are strictly blue-collar and, I daresay, typically American. They roam the streets, disheveled, dispossessed, homeless. They are the middle class, marginalized into oblivion.
Taken singly, zombies are slow, idiotic, and relatively easy to kill. Laughable, even, with their witless drive and ungainly movements. One zombie? Destroy the brain, drop the shambler. But collectively, zombies are an inexorable force, knocking down chain-link fences, busting through windows, treating your neighbors like bowls of spinach dip. They’re the ultimate union. And their collective bargaining powers can’t be legislated away.
To survive the zombie apocalypse, you’re going to need a plan. Survival means you’re going to have to accept the blue-collar ethos that the zombies embody. Time to roll up your sleeves, put on your best Mike Rowe face, and get ready to do some dirty work. In no particular order, here are 10 essential items for surviving the zombie apocalypse. For a more in depth exploration into zombie apocalypse survival techniques and items, feel free to check out This Dark Earth, my zombie survival treatise-cum-novel. Wait. Not a cum-novel. Strike that last bit. Sheesh, you people.
Headknockers come in a variety of shapes and sizes. You can find one in every garage, every toolbox in America. A hammer, a hatchet, a crowbar, a two-by-four. A Louisville slugger. Destroy the brain and you’re good to go. Big plus: relatively quiet and no need to reload.
Any more zombies than two, your best bet is hunching over in a protective ball, placing your head between your legs and giving your gluteus maximus one last smooch in thanks for all the good times.
If you have Kevlar motorcycle gear, in addition to looking cool, you’re freaking gold, hombre.
Unless you’re into the weird stuff.
‘Zombie’ attacks continue? Man naked, bites off chunk of man’s arm
PALMETTO, Fla. – The latest in a string of “zombie” like attacks happened in a Manatee County home Wednesday night after a man under the influence went into a fit of rage and bit a piece of someone’s arm off during a visit with his children.
Much like the Miami face-eating attack, 26-year-old Charles Baker got naked, ate human flesh and wouldn’t go down without a fight, according to a Manatee County Sheriff’s Office report.
Authorities say Baker went to his girlfriend’s home on 25th St in Palmetto to visit his kids at 10:15 p.m. They say he was high on an unknown substance when he knocked on the door, then barged in, began yelling and taking off his clothes.
He was screaming and wouldn’t calm down, then began throwing furniture around the home. Jeffery Blake, who lives in the home, attempted to restrain Baker, but the suspect bit him, taking a chunk of his flesh from his bicep. Blake, 48, was able to get Baker to the ground and kept him there until two deputies arrived.
When law enforcement came inside, Blake released Baker. Baker got up, but would not respond to deputies orders. The suspect instead faced the deputies, tensing his body, clenching his fists and screaming.
Baker, still naked, acted like he was going to rush the deputies, according to the report. Deputy Wildt deployed his an electronic control device after giving a verbal warning.
Baker fell to the ground, and then tried to get back up, so Deputy Wildt deployed the device again. Baker pulled the probes out, so deputy Blake deployed his electric shock device.
Those probes were also pulled out, and Deputy Wildt deployed a second cartridge. By this time, several other deputies had arrived on scene and were able to hold him down and handcuff him.
Baker was taken to Manatee Memorial Hospital for evaluation before being transported to the jail.
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.