In September 1992, his second year in college, he began appearing unclad in public and led a campus "nude-in" to protest social repression.

Campus police first arrested him that fall for indecent exposure when he jogged unclothed near southside dormitories late on a Saturday night.

He explained that when he dressed in expensive, uncomfortable, stylish, "appropriate" attire, he hid the fact that his personal belief was that clothes were useless in his environment except as a tool for class and gender differentiation.

[3] He appeared on national talk shows, was profiled in a photo essay in Playgirl and was parodied in the 1994 college comedy PCU.

[4] Then neither employed nor furthering his education, Martinez continued living in Berkeley, and was arrested for public nudity by the city police.

After his return to the United States and continued unemployment, he began to manifest symptoms of mental illness and he spent much of the decade following his period of national attention moving among halfway houses, psychiatric institutions, occasional homelessness, and jail, but never getting comprehensive treatment, his family said.

On the evening of his death, a guard checked on him at 11 p.m. and he was fine, but a few minutes later other inmates reported hearing sounds coming from his cell.

[12] In 2009, his mother, Esther Krenn, settled a wrongful death lawsuit against Santa Clara County, which paid her $1 million and altered its policies so that family members would be notified in the event of a suicide attempt.