Zombie Apocalypse Now

“He was a good kid,” said Ruth Charles about her son Rudy Eugene. “He gave me a nice card on Mother’s Day.” And then he died naked under a hail of gunfire as he refused to stop eating the face of a 65-year-old vagrant, growling at a fairly surprised policeman as he shot him.

The card was a sweet gesture, Mrs. Charles, but the whole “Nekkid and eating a man’s face off while not responding to gunfire” trumps it fairly solidly: The verdict is in and the gavel has fallen, with a resounding “ZOMBIE!” being screamed in judgment. “Bailiff, shoot him in the head. The head, mind you. Next case?”

This story is so big that no one has focused on the racial make-up of the officer and suspect, which is all that ever matters (as opposed to the offense for which he was shot). Sure, out of pure instinct a family member is quoted by one press outlet as trying to argue that “they should have just pulled him off of that man and arrested him” for the excessive use of force angle. But apparently people have such a hard time getting past “Holy Sweet Crap! He was actually eating that man’s face and growling!” that the “excessive force” aspect of this incident is getting a mulligan, having been overshadowed by the fact that he was actually eating that man’s face and growling, making shooting his crazy homicidal ass seem more reasonable than wrestling with him (and risking infection—we’ve seen the movies too, folks).

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