REPOSTED From USA TODAY
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — The former California college 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 the University of California, 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.
Family and friends said Martinez struggled for years with mental illness. He spent the last decade bouncing among halfway houses, psychiatric institutions, occasional homelessness and jail, without ever getting comprehensive treatment, his family said.
On Jan. 10, he was arrested after a fight at a halfway house where he was living and was being held on two counts of battery and one count of assault with a deadly weapon, authorities said.
Martinez was housed 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.
Bryan Schwartz, Martinez’s best friend, said the man who died in the jail cell hardly resembled the former high school star defensive lineman and straight-A student who charmed peers with his laid-back, kindhearted nature and penchant for non-conformity.
“Everyone loved him. He was warm, positive, brilliant. He was a math whiz even though he barely studied,” Schwartz said. “All the girls were asking him to the prom.”
In 1992, Martinez organized a “nude-in” protest at the university’s main 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.
Martinez also became the first person arrested under the Berkeley city ordinance, adopted in July 1993, after he and some of his supporters showed up at a City Hall meeting in the buff. He pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge and got two years of probation.
Martinez had been trying to write a book about his experiences when he became gripped by his mental illness, but even that couldn’t completely quash his charisma and generous spirit, his family said.
“I’d send him stuff in jail and he’d give it all away because he knew that so many people there have nothing — no one to visit them, send them things, fight for them,” his mother, who asked not to be named, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The last time she saw her son was three weeks ago, when she visited him in jail.
“He was sad. He was tired. He said he had had enough,” she said. “I alerted everyone, but nothing happened.”
