Victim of face-eating attack remains private
When Ronald Poppo was a kid in the 1950s and ’60s, a family Christmas in Brooklyn meant wind-up model trains circling the tree, Italian dinners of lasagna and stuffed squid and, because Dec. 25 was also hi s fat her ’s birthday, ricotta -filled cassata cake.
There was always music, because the Poppos have musical talent. Ronnie, as his older sister and two older brothers called him, played the violin as a child and guitar as a teenager.
And there was church, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as their mother was a devout Baptist.
An aunt brought Christmas presents, recalled Ronald’s sister, Antoinette Poppo, who still lives in New York. “We were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor,’’ she said.
It’s hard to say when Ronald Poppo last enjoyed childhood Christmas memories, had a merry, or even comfortable, Christmas. After vanishing from the family in the early 1970s, he encamped on the gritty streets of Miami, an inebriated vagrant drifting ever further from the mainstream.
His last known home was the concrete stairwell of a tourist-attraction parking garage. He surfaced again May 26 as the hapless victim in one of South Florida’s most sensational, blooddrenched crimes. That day, a naked, crazed, 31-year-old Rudy Eugene attacked 65-year-old Poppo on the MacArthur Causeway, strip- ping away his clothes, then gnawing on Poppo’s face, leaving him mutilated and blind.
Police shot and killed Eugene about 18 minutes into the assault.
Through news of the event, Poppo’s stunned siblings learned he’d been alive all along, and people from his past began to emerge with snippets of information about his life before he disappeared onto the streets.
Following intensive medical treatment at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Poppo moved to Jackson Memorial Perdue Medical Center, an 11-acre, 163-bed nursing home/rehab facility in South Dade, its halls now cheerily decked with holiday decorations.
He has refused all interview requests since the incident, and apart from allowing doctors to hold a news conference in June, he hasn’t authorized his treating physicians to talk about his medical condition.
Jackson officials closely guard his privacy.
Photos displayed at the June news conference showed Poppo’s face as a mass of clots and raw tissue, his eye sockets hidden under flaps of skin, his nose gone, his cheeks and forehead partially so.
His sister says that when they talk, brother Ronnie doesn’t mention the attack, the past or how he spends his time. But he did recently say that he likes his accommodations and the people who care for him.
“He says they take him outs i de and walk him around the place,’’ Antoinette Poppo said. “He’s glad to be there. … He doesn’t really talk much at all.’’
He told her that “his face hasn’t healed yet,” but that he doesn’t want more surgery because “it’s going to hurt.”
Apart from stealing his eyesight, getting him off the streets and making him the object of ghoulish fascination worldwide, the savagery of the May 26 assault has wrought other changes for Ronald Poppo. Some he has embraced; others not.
He knows that his brothers are aware of his circumstances, but he hasn’t asked to call them nor has he asked them or his sister to visit.
A New York newspaper found an adult daughter, Janice Poppo DiBello, in New Jersey, the product of a brief marriage in the late 1960s. The Poppos never knew she existed, Antoinette said.
After the attack on her father, Janice reached out to her aunt and uncles — Albert in California and Joseph in New York — but hasn’t tried to get in touch with her father, Antoinette said. Nor, she said, has Ronnie asked to speak to his daughter. In fact, Ron Poppo doesn’t believe he has any children, his sister said.
Poppo’s last known home was the garage stairwell at Jungle Island, according to outreach workers from the Homeless Trust, who last spoke to him there two days before attack.
Although a chronic alcoholic, Poppo didn’t bother anyone, Jungle Island employees said. Sometimes he’d clean up trash in the garage and they’d give him a few dollars. But a patron complained a few days before the attack and the outreach workers called police, who cleared out Poppo’s stairwell. Poppo hit the road.
He was lounging in the shade on the MacArthur walkway near The Miami Herald parking garage about 2 p.m. when Rudy Eugene spotted him and began his savage attack.
His face was the last thing Poppo ever saw.