In a truly astounding example of the old phrase “truth is stranger than fiction,” a homeless man in Miami has been charged with stabbing a tourist from Chicago.
The kicker?
The homeless man in the case has no arms.
Allegedly, Jonathan Crenshaw, the man charged in this case, used his feet to stab a tourist named Cesar Coronado with a pair of scissors. Coronado and a female friend were visiting Miami from Chicago.
Crenshaw is 46 years old. He’s apparently something of a fixture in the Miami Beach area, as tourists like to watch him painting on canvases using his feet at a popular South Beach area.
Miami-area newspapers, like the Miami New Times, say that Crenshaw’s painting are colorful mosaics, usually featuring the theme of eyes in some way. He sells them, too, apparently for as much as $60 a piece.
According to police reports, Crenshaw claims he was lying on the ground when Coronado came up to him and punched or kicked him in the head. He reacted by stabbing Coronado twice with a pair of scissors held in his feet, and then fled the scene.
But Coronado’s side of this bizarre story is different. A friend travelling with him says that they approached Crenshaw to ask for directions, when the armless man suddenly jumped up and stabbed Coronado in the arm.
Coronado was taken to the hospital, and his left arm was bleeding when he was admitted.
This is not Crenshaw’s first run in with police, either. In 2014 he was apparently sentenced to 180 days in jail for felony battery of a police officer. And his arrest record also includes battery charges against firefighters and city code inspectors too.
The Miami New Times has apparently profiled Crenshaw in the past. In fact, he told a reporter in 2011 that he was born in Alabama and moved around often with his mother as a child, from Alabama to El Paso to San Diego and many other cities.
He also told the reporter who interviewed him that his mother fed him rat poison, “for the insurance policy, I guess,” and that he was born with “sharp teeth” but that the government “drilled them in half” when he was five years old. He claimed he had to move into a hotel after he was “stabbed to death twice”, but reincarnated by a “big bolt of lightning,” which brought him back to life.
And to make an odd story even stranger, Crenshaw told the same reporter that he’s impregnated many women throughout his life, starting at the age of 8, and that the pop star Gloria Estefan had birthed at least 200 of his children.
On Tuesday night he was charged with aggravated battery for the whole stabbing thing, and his bond was set at $7,500.