According to Bossip.com, after stabbing his roommate to death, Mauricio Mendez Lopez raised a plastic cup filled partially with the victim’s blood and drank it, according to an eyewitness. “He had a cup in his hand,” Mariella Mendez, who lived with the two men, told a Bay News 9 interpreter Tuesday. "He told me, ‘That dog is dead now and his life belongs to me.’ "

Lopez “raised the glass in the air and said aloud, ‘…this is my secret,’ and laughed as he ran away from the residence,” according to a Bartow police report. Lopez, who remains at large, is accused of killing 32-year-old Macario Cruz about 9:30 p.m. Sunday in the house they shared at 1055 Martin Luther King Blvd. in Bartow. Bartow police say the fatal confrontation stemmed from a love triangle where Cruz was in a relationship with Mariella Mendez, who also lives in the home with her children. She is the sister of Cruz’s wife, who lives in Mexico.

Lopez, the uncle of the two women, didn’t approve of the relationship. Reports say he had warned the two July 24 that he would tell Cruz’s wife and Mendez’s father if the affair wasn’t ended. On that same day, Lopez struck Cruz in the face with a 15-pound hand weight, then chased Cruz and Mendez from the home with a knife, police reports said.

“In Mexico, they say that the blood he drank was so he could evade law enforcement,” Mendez said. “He kept saying that his life belonged to him and that’s why he had to drink it. To me, it’s as if the devil was working him.” A Mexican woman, who asked her name be withheld because of the nature of the event, said the ritual is known to criminal underworld elements in Mexico, especially among drug dealers.

“They do that in order to get strength,” the woman said. “It’s a scary thought that someone would do that. But it is out there.”