Results tagged “schizophrenics”

The man who gained national fame in the early 90s for attending classes at U.C. Berkeley wearing nothing but a G-string, Luis Andrew Martinez a.k.a. The Naked Guy, met his end in a Santa Clara County jail cell where he cinched a plastic bag around his neck and died of suffocation in May 2006. It turns out he was schizophrenic, and after proving "people define normalcy in their own terms" and ultimately getting expelled from Cal, he was in and out of jails and mental institutions where he did not always receive appropriate care. His mother, Esther Krenn, brought a wrongful death lawsuit against the county and yesterday won a $1M settlement on the grounds of "reckless disregard or deliberate indifference" to her son's condition.

San Franciscans who spend any time around 6th or 7th and Market are no strangers to schizophrenia. Lowboy is a new novel that centers on a young man living with the disease who rides the New York City subway believing he holds the key to saving the earth from overheating, and it has something to do with meeting a girl. John Wray, the author of Lowboy -- his third and much buzzed-about novel -- is giving three Bay Area readings this week, including one tonight at Book Passage at the Ferry Building, and one tomorrow night at Diesel Bookstore in Oakland. He sat down with SFist for a few questions (via email).