Posted on 05/20/2006 12:02:08 PM PDT by TFFKAMM
The former University of California, Berkeley student known as the "Naked Guy," who gained notoriety for attending class in the buff in the early 1990s, died of an apparent suicide while in jail, authorities said.
Andrew Martinez, 33, whose stripped-down campus strolls got him expelled from UC Berkeley and prompted the famously liberal city to adopt a strict anti-nudity ordinance, was found dead Thursday in the Santa Clara County Main Jail, said jail spokesman Mark Cursi.
Martinez was found under his bed covers with a plastic bag cinched around his head, Cursi said. Officials are investigating the death as an apparent suicide.
The 6-foot-4 Martinez had been in custody since Jan. 10 on three felony charges of battery and assault with a deadly weapon, authorities said.
Martinez was housed in solitary confinement in a maximum security area and was last seen alive around 11 p.m. Wednesday during a routine cell check, Cursi said.
He was found about 20 minutes later when other prisoners reported hearing unusual sounds from his cell. He was pronounced dead a short time later.
In 1992, Martinez organized a "Nude-In" protest at the university's Sproul Plaza. He said he was trying to make a point about free expression at the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement.
"What I am getting out here is there's a lot of social control going on here," he told the crowd at the nude-in. The message caught on and nude spottings spiked on campus. Martinez, whose naked notoriety landed him on national television talk shows, was expelled the following year after the university rewrote its dress code to ban nudity...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
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Suicide??? How do you smother yourself to death with a bag?
You really gotta want it.
When I was in high school one of my schoolmates mothers smothered herself with a garbage bag. She twisted up part of the bag and tied it to a doorknob and put the other end over her face and leaned against it. She even found a way to bind her hands well enough that she couldn't get them undone if she changed her mind.
Quick, what's the lawyer's number?
There are 8 million stories in the naked city. LOL!
They arrested him for going to class naked? I thought Berkeley was more tolerant than that.
Oh, I see. They only kicked him out. But it's still not very tolerant of them.
Wait.......on second thought, I don't want to know.
More proof to my assertion that most liberal types trying to upset social mores are really deeply unhappy.
whenever I see someone Michael Newdow he always strikes me as a very unhappy man. Which is good, because he deserves it.
Someone like Cindy Sheehan, on the other hand, doesn't seem intelligent enough to know she is unhappy.
One less leftist vermin. No tears. No loss to humanity.
No, no they didn't arrest him for going to class naked. The City Of Berkley busted him for wandering around town unclothed. As I recall this included at least one sojourn in front of an ice cream parlor frequented by children.
He became obnoxious. After a time even Berzerkleyites got sick of him and ran him out of town - but not for violating any Moral standards.
"The 6-foot-4 Martinez had been in custody since Jan. 10 on three felony charges of battery and assault with a deadly weapon, authorities said."
But I thought he was a gentle-souled peacenik?
In certain circles, I'm also known as the "Naked Guy." The legend continues...
I think we should hold a nude-in protest.
When I first moved to the East Bay in '93, the Big Berkeley Issue of the day was public nudity. A UC student named Andy Martinez had been attending classes and strolling around campus wearing nothing but sandals, and the story had broken nationally and turned into a cause celebre, with Martinez playing his rebel/victim role to the hilt after he got busted for indecent exposure when venturing into the city of Berkeley. A coterie of old hippies, who acted as his support group by joining him in naked demonstrations, contended that nudity was protected free speech, and that the City of Berkeley had no anti-nudity ordinance, and therefore no legal right to arrest nekkid people, or even to ask them to dress.
When the public-nakedness movement was at its peak, a character named "Moe the Schmo" made his appearance on the scene. Moe was about sixty years old, rail-thin and sunken-chested, and had the sallow skin and vacant eyes of a man who'd spent a good deal of his life in mental institutions. He did his part for the Body Freedom Movement by standing every day at the corner of Telegraph and Haste, starkers except for old shoes and a baseball cap, and handing out photocopied leaflets filled with the kind of incomprehensible verbal diarrhea familiar to anyone who's ever encountered such paranoid-schizo urban street-crusaders.
Anyway, one Saturday my friend was thumbing through magazines at Cody's, a famous bookstore right in the heart of Berkeley moonbat land. And who should stride into the crowded store, wearing naught but footwear and a dirty Oakland A's cap, but Moe the Schmo himself? The store manager was on duty behind the desk, and grimly noted the naked loon's entry onto the premises, but did nothing else. (Berkeley's opportunistic public nudists -- mostly old male exhibitionists -- had been increasingly invading private businesses, not content to get their jollies exposing themselve on city streets. Too, in Berkeley, interfering with the antics of a street crazy, even on one's own private property, can often be an invitation to ugly confrontations, public censure and even lawsuits.)
My friend returned to perusing periodicals until about a minute later, when he heard shouting and cursing from the back of the store. He looked up, and saw the manager frog-marching Moe across the floor and out the door, all the while screaming abuse and threats at the bare-assed street person. When Moe had been tossed out on the street, the manager turned to an assistant and continued his rant at maximum volume, and with a full plethora of colorful epithets.
From what my friend overheard, when Moe had walked in, he had made a beeline run straight to the children's books section, which was packed with kids. The manager had probably correctly surmised that even the looniest Berkeley professional activist would never challenge him for 86ing the old pervert, and promptly threw him back onto Telegraph's vomit-slicked sidewalks. According to my pal, it took about 20 minutes before the manager had cooled down enough to speak in a normal tone of voice.
I often wonder if that particular incident, which was witnessed by about 30 or 40 people, did more than any of the other nudist hi-jinks to force the city council to adopt an explicit anti-nudity ordinance, and doom the golden era of clothing-optional Berkeley.
Obviously he was not right in the head, and was in worse shape than anyone had known.
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