Bath Salts Blamed for Zombie-Like Attack
A Miami man who bit and chewed off the face of another man on Saturday, May 26 was believed to be under the influence of an LSD type drug. Rudy Eugene, 31, was killed after police found him naked and feasting on the face of another man. The victim has been identified as 65-year-old Ronald Poppo, a homeless man Eugene attacked at random and stripped naked before the assault.
Larry Vega, an eyewitness to the attack, was biking on MacArthur Causeway’s pedestrian walkway when he came across the gruesome scene and alerted a nearby policeman. Recalling the incident to WSVN Miami he said, “And the guy was like tearing him to pieces with his mouth, so I told him, ‘Get off!’ You know, it’s like the guy just kept eating the other guy away, like ripping his skin.” According to Vega, a police office then came over and said, ‘Get off!’ several times but Eugene refused to listen. “The guy just stood his head up like that with a piece of flesh in his mouth and growled,” said Vega.
When the attack continued, Vega says the officer fired his weapon but the man continued to chew flesh off the victim. He then fired several more times and killed the cannibalistic man. “It was just a blob of blood,” said Vega describing the scene. “You couldn’t really see, it was just blood all over the place.”
Police now believe that bath salts are to blame for the zombie-like attack. The bath salts in question, however, are not the aromatic additions to bath tubs used in numerous households, but instead are an LSD-like drug that gives users delusions and at times super strength. Dr. Paul Adams of Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital detailed the dangerous drug to CBS Monday noting that bath salts make a person’s body temperature rise to an extremely high level and they can become very aggressive. “Some have used their jaws as a weapon during attacks,” said Adams. He added that patients can be, “extremely strong, I took care of a 150-pound individual who you would have thought was 250 pounds,” said Adams. “It took six security officers to restrain the individual.”
Police report that the victim lost 75 percent of his face. The man’s eyes, lips, nose and forehead were all eaten away. –danielle canada
