Chronically homeless and recently blinded, Ronald Poppo calmly told detectives about the sudden savage assault that cost him parts of his face.

A man in a green shirt came out of a car he had hitchhiked in, grousing about not being able to score on the beach. The man seemed friendly enough at first, Poppo said. The stranger went from being in a “glad mood” to singing the 1960s tune A Lover’s Concerto and saying “you are going to be my wife.” Then, Poppo said, he “turned vicious after a minute or two, and he started to rip me apart.”

“He attacked me. He just ripped me to ribbons. He chewed up my face. He plucked out my eyes. Basically, that’s all there is to say about it,” Poppo told Miami investigators.

In a recorded interview with Miami police obtained and first reported by Miami Herald news partner CBS4, Poppo is heard for the first time describing the May 26 assault by a crazed assailant who “must have had a bad day at the beach.” It was the attack that catapulted Poppo out of his anonymous life in the city’s shadows onto the front pages of newspapers around the world.

Poppo, a homeless alcoholic who lived in the Jungle Island parking garage, will now be best known for having been the victim of a cannibal. Gruesome photos of his face circulated on the Internet.

His recorded interview took place July 19 at Jackson Memorial Perdue Medical Center, a long-term-care facility in Cutler Bay. Poppo calmly explained that he had no address and was too old to work.

He told Sgt. Altarr Williams and Det. Frankie Sanchez that he was standing near South Bayshore Drive and 13th Street, just beside the Miami Herald building, when he heard a car door slam and then saw a man appear. The man was bigger than Poppo and carried nothing in his hands.

He thought it happened on May 16, but the sergeant explained to Poppo that his recall was about 10 days off.

It was the 26th, a Saturday, at about 2 p.m. Masses of revelers were partying in Miami Beach for Urban Beach Week. Poppo was on the MacArthur Causeway, minding his own business, when he was approached by Rudy Eugene, a 31-year-old who washed cars, and liked to smoke marijuana and quote the Bible.

“For a while he was acting nice. Then he got flustered. He probably remembered something that happened on the beach and was not happy about it,” Poppo said.

He said Eugene said something about wanting “to score” and not being able to.

Eugene, he said, started talking funny. He started to scream. He seemed preoccupied with death, Poppo recalled. Although he did not mention it in the taped interview, in a later meeting with police the victim said Eugene accused him of stealing his Bible.

“For a very short amount of time I thought he was a good guy,” Poppo said. “But he just went and turned berserk.”

Poppo remembered Eugene telling him that they would both die.

“You and me buddy and nobody else,” he quoted Eugene saying. “He must have been souped up on something.”

Poppo calmly described how Eugene chewed his face and gouged his eyes out using only “brute force.” Eugene, he said, carried no weapon.

“He mashed my face into the sidewalk,” he said. “My face is all bent and bashed up. My eyes, my eyes got plucked out. He was strangling me in wrestling holds, at the same time he was picking my eyes out.”