Andrew Martinez, a.k.a. ''The Naked Guy, '' above, shown in class in 1992 when he was a sopohomore at UC Berkeley. (San Jose Mercury News)
Posted on 05/18/2009 6:40:23 AM PDT by CounterCounterCulture
To many, Luis Andrew Martinez was simply the Naked Guy — a Berkeley fixture who gained national notoriety in the 1990s for refusing to wear clothes.
About 10 years later, on May 18, 2006, isolated and alone in a Santa Clara County Jail cell, Martinez — a diagnosed schizophrenic — tied a plastic bag around his head and killed himself.
Today — on the third anniversary of his death — lawyers for his family plan to announce a $1 million settlement reached with Santa Clara County, along with an agreement from the county to adopt a policy in how it deals with mentally ill inmates.
"Andrew was a victim of a failed system of criminalizing mental illness and warehousing sick people in jails without adequate facilities and qualified medical staffs for the treatment of their sickness," said Geri Lynn Green, attorney for Martinez's mother, Esther Krenn. "The whole safety net fell apart in Santa Clara. It was a total failure by the jail to provide necessary care."
In the wrongful death suit filed in federal court in 2006, Krenn, a Cupertino resident, accused the county of violating her son's civil rights by failing to provide the proper care for him and allowing conditions at the main jail to deteriorate to the point where they ignored his safety.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Andrew Martinez, a.k.a. ''The Naked Guy, '' above, shown in class in 1992 when he was a sopohomore at UC Berkeley. (San Jose Mercury News)
I don’t want to know where he was hiding the plastic bag.Also,there’s always a family member around to sue,but not to look after the individual.
Sodom and Gomorrah
This mentally ill guy goes to school naked for years and is embraced and portrayed as some soft of hero of liberal freedom of expression. Yet when the same illness causes him to tie a bag on his head it’s all the jails fault. Go figure.
Underneath the fancy clothes, we’re all Naked Guys.
Blame squarely belongs on the shoulders of the ACLU, they forced mental institutions to close, because they thought it was degrading for mental cases to be locked up, and that they should be on the streets.
California, what can you say?
He was smart enough to attend UC Berkeley but didn’t understand that he should wear clothing?
So, if a pedophile feels rejection because a same-sex 9 year old rebuffs his/her advances and kills himself (and put in jail for inappropriate behavior), we are supposed to pay him money?
We are spinning into insanity at blinding speed.
‘It isn’t about the money, ya unnerstand, it’s about sending a message...’
Our schools and even the world could not produce the med staffs necessary to adequately deal with the US’s mental illnesses that you would find in our nation’s prisons, and staff half way houses and drug abuse centers and all our hospitals, and nursing homes or find enough health techs and psych techs who are dedicated enough to want to work at top effort at 8 dollars an hour average salary!
The man’s family should have taken this young man firmly in had and got him help before he ever got to this stage...screw political correctness.
That is about it! There is more money in it.
When someone persists in doing something that's clearly outside the norms of society, it's a sure sign that all is not right in that person's mind. The same is true, I think, for homosexuality, despite the fact that the psychiatric profession has succumbed to political pressures and declared the condition "normal."
Yes. Why weren’t they (the family) taking care of this guy? Another reason California is broke. It is a damn jail for God’s sake. Not the Four Seasons. Or Bath England—a nurturing retreat for the sickly. It is a taxpayer funded institution. She is stealing our money. This is BS. She got paid for neglect herself.
The school didn’t even have the wherewithal to tell this idiot it was impermissible to go to school naked. But the jail was responsible for his suicide.
His parents were responsible for his suicide.
Just another case where the politicians fold like a cheap suit and hand over the taxpayers money...no problem.
some soft of hero ?......................;^0 Freudian slip?
It's hard to say...
These people live in a different planet, where killing unborn babies-—men marrying men-—and attending school naked are the norm. Bizarro world....
Ick, who sat in the desk in the following class.
LOL!!.........
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