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The figures born on this date span continents and centuries, ranging from a seventeenth-century Chinese-Dutch warlord who expelled European colonizers from Taiwan to a French pirate who operated among the buccaneers of the Caribbean. Koxinga, who seized Formosa from the Dutch East India Company in 1662, and Anne Dieu-le-Veut, whose life among the brethren of the coast made her one of the rare documented women of the golden age of piracy, represent the more historically complex end of the spectrum. The later birthdays shift toward individual criminality: Heather Pressdee, a Pennsylvania nurse convicted of murdering vulnerable patients in her care, stands among a pattern of healthcare workers whose positions granted access that was ultimately turned against those they were meant to protect.

August 28, 1624 - Koxinga

Koxinga occupies an ambiguous place in history — celebrated as a loyalist and liberator in some traditions, yet his campaigns left considerable destruction across coastal China and culminated in the forcible expulsion of an established colonial power from Taiwan. His resistance to the Qing conquest was sustained over years of military operations that ravaged coastal populations, including a failed assault on Nanjing in 1659 that ended in severe losses on all sides. The Kingdom of Tungning he founded persisted for two decades after his death, making his conquest of Taiwan one of the more consequential military actions of the 17th-century Pacific world.

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August 28, 1976 - Elias Abuelazam

Over a roughly three-month period in 2010, a series of stabbings across Michigan — targeting Black men in particular — left five dead and many others injured before an arrest was made at an Atlanta airport. The attacks, attributed to Abuelazam, were marked by their frequency and apparent racial targeting, with investigators linking him to eighteen incidents before he was apprehended while attempting to board a flight to Israel.

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August 28, 1982 - Heather Pressdee

A registered nurse working across five Pennsylvania nursing homes, Pressdee administered lethal doses of insulin to patients in her care — a population among the most vulnerable to undetected harm. Authorities linked her to the deaths of 17 patients in total, though she was convicted on three counts of murder and 19 counts of attempted murder. She told her attorney she believed she was ending her victims' suffering, a justification that placed her within a documented pattern of healthcare workers who have used proximity and medical access to cause patient deaths at scale.

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August 28, 1961 - Agustín Ramón Martínez Martínez

Operating across two countries over a span of roughly twenty-five years, he sustained a pattern of killing that endured long enough to suggest both deliberate concealment and a capacity to evade sustained scrutiny. The alias he adopted — evoking a foreign military identity — added a layer of constructed persona to a record that combined violent crime with fraud. His confirmed victims number at least six, though investigators considered the full count likely higher.

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August 28, 1661 - Anne Dieu-le-Veut

One of the rarest figures in the history of Atlantic piracy, she operated in an era and a world that offered women almost no recognized role in maritime violence — yet she carved one out regardless. Her inclusion here reflects the site's cataloging of those who lived outside sanctioned boundaries through force or threat of force, however small their numbers.

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