I’d like to say that I am shocked and surprised, but I lived in Florida for 6 years and while I never heard anything like this, I heard plenty of other oddities:

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked, and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp Saturday, police said.

(Here’s the Miami Herald’s original story and the follow-up.)

There were lots of oddities about that place when I lived there. No one drove the maximum speed limits. The number of murders was unbelievable. There were neighborhoods you didn’t drive into, and they would be just couple of blocks from multi-million dollar homes. I remember one story about an escaped mental patient carrying an AK-47 rifle down the middle of a major road. No one was hurt. Of course, the dead German tourist thing happened right before I moved there. Nothing like this, but these other stories are so routine they don’t even make the paper.

We went to see The Avengers this weekend. I turned to my wife at the end and said if there is any one lesson from these super hero movies, it is that living in New York City is a very dangerous place. It seems NYC gets destroyed every year!

I was kidding about New York. Not so much about Miami.