Rudy Eugene, the face eating cannibal of Miami, was not on bath salts. . Photocredit: Allvoices
Street drug “bath salts” were not what motivated the “Miami zombie”, Rudy Eugene to gnaw off the face of a homeless man on 26 May, after lab tests found no evidence of the drugs in his system.
Eugene, 31, was shot dead by police when he refused to stop attacking 65-year-old Ronald Poppo under an overpass in Miami. The entire attack, culminating in a nude Eugene attempting to chew off Poppo’s face, lasted at least 18 minutes and was captured on surveillance cameras. The officer who killed Eugene said that the man growled at him when he ordered him to stop chewing on Poppo’s face; the family of Eugene has said that they will not pursue any legal action against the officer who killed him.
Doctors, meanwhile, have attempted to surgically piece Poppo’s face back together; so far, they have had to remove his left eye and are hoping to restore vision to his right. He remains hospitalized.
More on the face-eating cannibal case at The Periscope Post.
Face-eating rampage remains a mystery
In the absence of any drug to blame the attacks on, police and media have not explanation for Eugene’s horrifying last moments. Eugene’s friends and family claim that the man was religious, kind-hearted, and didn’t drink or take any drugs harder than marijuana. The lab tests back that up, having found no evidence of any drugs in his system other than marijuana which, a toxicology expert told the Associated Press, was unlikely to have caused the face-eating rampage. “There’s no answer for it, not really,” Eugene’s younger brother, Marckenson Charles, said in an interview. “Anybody who knew him knows this wasn’t the person we knew him to be. Whatever triggered him, there is no answer for this.”
It could have been the pot
Actually, Dr. Patricia Junquera, assistant professor at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine told the Associated Press, it could have been the marijuana. Marijuana comes in two strains, sativa and indica; sativa can increase dopamine levels and give the user energy. Users don’t often know what is in what they smoke and toxicology tests can’t differentiate between the two in the blood. If Eugene had a mental disorder, she told the AP, “the marijuana could have increased even further the dopamine levels and aggravated the situation. So that can’t be ruled out.” So, said Max Read at Gawker, “Marijuana! Rudy Eugene, dangerous Miami zombie, was on the trendy new drug marijuana, which your teen is probably doing right now.”
Whew, then, just that ‘nightmare drug’, pot
Miami police once blamed the horrible incident on that new drug scare, bath salts, Read at Gawker recalled. Well, thank God it wasn’t bath salts. “Not that bath salts are cool — they are scary (and once in a while sort of funny). Just, sometimes, bad stuff happens without the involvement of the moral panic of that particular month. Sometimes it’s just the nightmare drug pot.”
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