'Naked Guy' kills self in jail

Attended UC-Berkeley in '90s without clothes

SAN JOSE (AP) - 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-inch 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.

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.