Fallen Man Stripped of Jewelry, Wallet, Vital Organs

CLEVELAND, OH - A man who collapsed on a downtown Cleveland sidewalk at 3:00 a.m. Saturday night was stripped of his wallet, jewelry and vital organs by dawn, local police reported.

Identified using DNA harvested from his bones, a nearby security camera revealed the efficiency with which passerby reduced an unconscious 42 year-old Randall Weldon to little more than a plundered skeleton.

"The surveillance footage shows that at 3:01 a pedestrian stopped to investigate Mr. Weldon's condition by poking him with their shoe, then made off with his wallet," reported Cleveland police spokesman Ryan Berg, "30 seconds later a pair of women liberated Mr. Weldon of all his jewelry and performed a thorough search of his pockets. Then, at 3:05 a.m., a man carrying a cooler cut Mr. Weldon open and removed his kidneys, heart, lungs and liver."

At 3:09 an individual wielding a pair of pliers harvested Weldon's teeth, then took his shoes, noted Berg. What followed, he said, was a teeming, amorphous swarm of humanity that, "Picked the poor bastard clean."

Microbiologist Dr. Stanley Boyd of Stanford University called the display 'sensationally impressive'.

"The video from a sociological perspective is highly disturbing," Boyd remarked, "From a microbiological perspective however, here we see human beings demonstrating an ability to decompose both inorganic and organic matter at more than one thousand times the rate of common bacteria. It's truly remarkable."