Miami 'zombie' face-eating attack by Rudy Eugene spawns dark humor, jokes on Internet social media

MIAMI - Just hours after last weekend's gruesome face-eating assault on a homeless man in Miami, the news had quickly spread over the Internet via social media, according to a report by the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel .

The attacker, Rudy Eugene, was named The Miami Zombie and given the Twitter handle @TheMiamiZombie.  

Talk of a Zombie takeover quickly surfaced.

Eugene, 31, refused a Miami police officer's order to stop chewing on 65-year-old Ronald Poppo's face. Eugene was then shot and killed.

The incident made worldwide headlines.

Making light of human tragedy is nothing new. But, according to the Sentinel report, a period of shock and mourning that usually follows a horrific event has been evaporated by social media.

"One of the missions in comedy is to find a line and deliberately cross it," said Will Watkins, who teaches a comedian course at the Fort Lauderdale Improv told the Sentinel.

In addition to all the jokes, photographs, heavily altered and even faked, began turning up.

Several phony Facebook accounts under the name of Eugene Rudy were created as well.

According to the Sentinel, the word "zombie" on Twitter shot up from about 15,000 tweets a day to more than 80,000 by Wednesday.

To read the Sentinel report, follow this link: http://sunsent.nl/NlbczQ