By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Splash
Florida man Timothy Schulz kicked off Memorial Day taking a dip in a lake full of alligators, got bit, emerged bleeding, grabbed garden shears, tried breaking into a car with a brick, failed, ran at police with the shears, got Tasered twice, staggered into their still-running cruiser to snatch their firearms when they shot him dead through the windshield.
RIP.
Meth to Madness
Schultz, six days after his last drug arrest, was seen earlier May 26 “acting bizarrely” at a convenience store at 5:56 that morning. When cops showed, they couldn’t find him.
Next sighting came 7:43 a.m. in the lake. One neighbor tried handing Schulz a life ring; growled at another whom fled and locked doors to his home in an already-gated community east of Tampa.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd called Schultz’s acts a “rampage,” adding “This is just crazy stuff, OK? You know that it’s got to be true — you can’t make it up.
“But when you’re on enough meth, the person you’re seeing is not the one who’s attacking.”
Mad Monk
The gaunt-cheeked, bearded Schulz looked like Rasputin, the Russian monk who mesmerized Czar Nicholas and Alexandra into believing only he could heal their son, Alexi, of hemophilia.
When Nick left St. Petersburg in 1915 to lead the Imperial Russian Army in World War I, Rasputin and the Czarina tried to consolidate their influence over the empire.
Then the Army flopped on the Eastern Front, prompting conservative noblemen in St. Petersburg to plot to assassinate the libertine monk some saw as the Antichrist.
Rasputin was lured after midnight Dec. 30, 1916 into the basement of Prince Yusepev’s grand palace, fed poisoned cupcakes, asked for wine (which had also been poisoned) and drank three glasses, but still showed no signs of distress.
At 2:30 a.m. Yusupov went upstairs, where his fellow conspirators handed him a revolver he took back to the basement. Yusupov told Rasputin he’d better look at the crucifix and say a prayer, then shot him through the chest.
The conspirators, one wearing the supposedly-dead man’s coat and hat, then drove to Rasputin’s apartment trying to make it look like the monk had come home that night.
When Yusupov returned to his palace basement to make sure Rasputin was dead, he wasn’t, attacked the prince and chased him upstairs to be shot by another nobleman in the courtyard. There he collapsed into a snowbank from which conspirators wrapped his body in cloth, drove it to the Petrovsky Bridge and dropped it into the Little Nevka River.
Grand Duchess Tatiana, who claimed Rasputin had raped her, was at his murder site where, in disguise, she supposedly witnessed his castration. That was her story, anyway.
He washed up New Year’s Day 200 meters downstream from the bridge. St. Petersburg Senior surgeon Dmitry Kosorotov’s autopsy said his body showed signs of severe trauma including three gunshot wounds (one at close range to the forehead), a slice to his left side and other injuries, many of which Kosorotov felt were administered post-mortem.
He found just one bullet in Rasputin’s body, but it was badly deformed and of a type too widely-used to trace. He found no evidence the monk had been poisoned nor was still living when thrown in the river. Later accounts claimed Rasputin’s penis had been severed, but Kosorotov found his genitals intact.
Rasputin’s daughter Maria, 18 when he died, emigrated after the 1917 Russian Revolution to France, where she worked as a dancer and lion tamer in the circus.
Home Front
Like the Little Nevka, Lake Michigan was too cold for gators the Saturday after Memorial Day. A woman unloaded a sandwich sign chalkboarded “Welcome to Anissa’s graduation party” onto Oval Beach next to two low adjacent tables, draped them in sparkly cloths weighted down by wood blocks against the wind, decked the tables with candles, ringed them with pillows, left.
A group of Mennonites — women in dark shawls, bearded men in brimmed hats — unloaded from a plain white van led by boys, also wearing black, teasing and taunting each other and chasing waves.
Young women gathered around the tables, their long skirts, shawls and hair flowing in the wind.
The Zen state of nothingness is not all it’s cracked up to be.
