A flesh-eating virus, the “Miami Zombie,” and more similarly gruesome stories have been dominating headlines in the past few weeks. While some have chalked up this strange string of events to creepy coincidence, the Twittersphere is abuzz with another explanation: a zombie apocalypse. From a blood-spitting anesthesiologist to an arm-biting contractor, the twisted cases fueling fears of the walking dead. Plus, see a map of where the past month's freakish incidents have gone down.
Another “zombie” made headlines this week when he told police he had eaten his housemate’s heart and brains after allegedly killing him on May 25. Alexander Kinyua, a 21-year-old student at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, posted a creepy message on Facebook foreshadowing the crime weeks before he was arrested. After the housemate went missing, Kinyua’s father phoned a detective to say one of his sons had found a human head and two hands in their basement trash bin. When police arrived, Kinyua confessed to murdering and eating the organs of Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, a fellow student at Morgan State University. He also directed police to the parking lot dumpster where he had deposited the rest of Kodie’s remains.
file, AP Photo
And you thought these things only happened in horror movies. New Jersey police broke into the home of Wayne Carter, 43, on Sunday after being tipped off that he was armed and threatening to hurt himself. Once inside, police found Carter repeatedly stabbing himself, screaming, and throwing his entrails at officers. They ordered him to drop the foot-long kitchen knife and fired two cans of pepper spray in his direction, to no avail. Finally, a SWAT team arrived and subdued Carter before taking him to the hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery and remained in critical condition as of Tuesday.
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This just about tops the list of “Most Bizarre Crime Stories Ever.” Police are still investigating the grisly case of the “Miami Zombie,” a naked man who was caught eating another naked man’s face and gouging his eyes out on the side of a major Miami highway in broad daylight last Saturday afternoon. When an officer approached, “the guy just stood…with pieces of flesh in his mouth,” a witness told reporters, adding that after the officer struck him the man just growled and continued eating the man’s face. Another cop arrived on the scene and shot dead the highway cannibal, who was identified Monday as Rudy Eugene, 31, and had been arrested seven other times over the past five years for misdemeanor charges. Police had previously theorized that his attack was motivated by “cocaine psychosis,” but an emergency room doctor speculated that his zombie-like feeding frenzy was spurred by consuming bath salts, a hallucinogenic drug that looks remarkably like the spa product it’s nicknamed after. Eugene’s victim, 65-year-old Ronald Poppo, has allegedly been homeless for decades and is still recovering in the hospital after losing a reported 80 percent of his face.
Miami-Dade Police Dept. / AP Photo
The only thing more disturbing than the sight of an anesthesiologist going berserk in a cop car is the thought of him injecting people with sedatives. After police cuffed Dr. Zachary Bird for allegedly driving under the influence, the 41-year-old Florida anesthesiologist banged his head repeatedly inside a cop car and spat blood in an officer’s face. “We expect that from some people we arrest, but a doctor knows how serious it is to contaminate someone with bodily fluid,” the officer told ABC News. “That’s the most unnerving part.” That and the fact that they found $40,000 cash in his pocket, along with a vial of an unidentifiable substance and a bottle of a drug used to treat erectile dysfunction, both in the back of his car.
When all else fails in a fight, use your teeth. This was apparently the muddled thought process of an intoxicated California man who resorted to biting off the tip of his cousin’s nose during a physical fight on Sunday. The two cousins had reportedly been snapping at each other all day at a booze-addled family gathering in Spring Valley. The nose-biter was arrested, and his victim was sent to the hospital with the recovered remnant of his sniffer.
Man or beast? A self-employed contractor was put behind bars this weekend after he bit the arms of two Lowe’s employees in Georgia, drawing blood in the process. Christopher Newman, 34, was shopping when he got into an argument with the employees and proceeded to attempt to gnaw off their arms.
There are criminals, and then there are deranged sociopaths who can’t stop themselves from harming helpless kittens. A Palm Coast man was arrested after confessing to an acquaintance that he “accidentally choked a kitten” that belonged to his roommates. Oh, and he “bit the lips off one of the kittens and burnt its ear and whiskers with a lighter.” Angel Vega Roman, 28, told police a broken heart compelled him to torture the creatures.
In mid-May, 12 students and two teachers at McArthur High School in Hollywood, Fla., were rushed to the hospital after breaking out in a severe rash, the cause of which was never explained. It started when a class of 21 students began compulsively scratching themselves and broke out in hives inside a reading room. After the Florida Public Health and Medical Department arrived at the school, infected students were quarantined and transported in a plastic-lined school bus to a local hospital.
Walter Michot / AP Photo
A week later, a similar rash hit Lauderdale Lakes Middle School, not far from where the first one struck. Four students and a teacher all broke out on their wrists during science class, though they weren’t working with chemicals.
The first case of necrotizing fasciitis, a rare flesh-eating bacterial infection, was reported in Georgia in mid-May, when Andy Copeland began recording his daughter’s rare condition online. Aimee Copeland, 24, began suffering symptoms of the infection days after a zip-lining accident in Georgia’s Little Tallapoosa River that left her with a gaping wound in her leg. The bacteria can eat through muscle, fat, and other bodily tissue and has left Aimee fighting for her life with a breathing tube down her throat, an amputated leg, and the loss of both her hands.
Weeks after Aimee Copeland contracted necrotizing fasciitis, a South Carolina woman was diagnosed with the flesh-eating virus, though her symptoms were less acute. Lana Kuykendall gave birth to twins on May 7 and was discharged soon after, but she returned to the hospital days later after noticing a rapidly expanding bruise on her leg. Doctors removed the dead skin and the tissue from both her legs and placed her on a ventilator. She remained in critical condition as of last Thursday, but was showing signs of improvement. A third case was reported in Georgia around the same time, but doctors insisted it was unrelated to the other two.
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