By Neetzan Zimmerman
Gawker
By now we’ve all seen the awful, awful story about the Florida man who was shot to death by police for refusing to stop chewing on another man’s face.
We joked around about it being the canary in the mine shaft of an impending zombie apocalypse. But as Tumblr blogger “I Hope Rick Santorum” helpfully points out in an appropriately viral post, this latest incident is not so much a warning shot as it is another in a disconcertingly intensifying stream of zombie-invoking headlines — all from the past two weeks, and all from the Sunshine State.
It all started on 5/16 with an ominous story about a “mysterious rash” at McArthur High School in Hollywood that launched a HazMat investigation. Twleve students and two teachers were treated and released. The source of the rash remains unknown.
Flashfoward two days: HazMat crews were called in to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to determine the source of an “unknown chemical” that sent five people to the hospital. Theories abound, but an exact cause was not confirmed.
On 5/20, the first real sign of trouble: 41-year-old Dr. Zachary Bird, was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol near Orlando and charged with felony battery charges for spitting blood in a patrolman’s face. He was also “extremely agitated and enraged,” and repeatedly banged his head on the patrol car’s plexiglass partition “until he bled.”
A few days later, another mystery rash was reported at yet another Broward County school. A HazMat team was once again called in to investigate, and once again left without any concrete answers.
The following day, a “disoriented” Canadian man was arrested aboard an American Airlines plane after he inexpicably attempted to rush the cockpit. The plane had just landed in Miami.
On Saturday, an unidentified homeless man had some 80% of his face bitten off by 31-year-old Rudy Eugene.
And here’s the bad news: Whatever’s happening in Florida appears to be spreading. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tweeted the following the following warning to its students last night: “Hazardous materials released at Institute for Genomic Biology. Escape area if safe to do so. Otherwise seek shelter.”
And in Hackensack, New Jersey, today, a man was rushed to the hospital after he reportedly cut out his own intestines and threw them at police officers.
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