The homeless man whose face was eaten by a naked cannibal in Miami has spoken out for the first time in a taped interview obtained by the local CBS station.
In one of the highest-profile cases of the so-called Zombie Apocalypse, Rudy Eugene dined on Ronald Poppo's face on the side of the MacArthur Causeway while witnesses watched in horror on Memorial Day weekend.
Rudy Eugene.
Cops shot the zombie dead but also plugged Poppo in the process.
Now the blinded, mangled Poppo speaks out, as first reported by CBS4:
"He attacked me. He just ripped me to ribbons. He chewed up my face. He plucked out my eyes. Basically that’s all there is to say about it. ...For a very short amount of time I thought he was a good guy. But he just went and turned berserk. He apparently didn’t have a good day at the beach and he — he was coming back. And I guess he took it out, took it out on me or something. I don’t know."
The cannibal's girlfriend blamed voodoo, the media assumed bath salts, but toxicology tests found only marijuana in Eugene's system.
The tape of Poppo is from a police interview conducted by Miami Detective Sgt. Altarr Williams and Detective Frankie Sanchez. Here's more from the conversation (scroll down to read full transcript), picking up after the cops asked Poppo what Eugene said:
POPPO: "'You, me, buddy, and nobody else here. I'm gonna — gonna kill you.’ Or something like that, I guess.”
WILLIAMS: "Did he say why?"
POPPO: "No, he just started to scream. And was talking kind of funny talk for a while too."
WILLIAMS: "What do you mean by funny talk?"
POPPO: "That I was gonna die. And he was gonna die. He must have been souped up on something."
Later, Poppo again describes the attack:
“He mashed my face into the sidewalk. My face is all bent and mashed up. My eyes, my eyes got plucked out. He was strangling me in wrestling holds at the same time he was plucking my eyes out.”
Here's the transcript of Poppo's interview:
Poppo's disfigured face is blurred out in this handout photo from Jackson Memorial Hospital.
