Police saw a 33-year-old Norwalk man trying to jump off the Noroton Avenue highway bridge, then arrested him after he ran away and then fought with officers, a Darien police captain said.
Capt. Jeremiah Marron Jr. described the incident to the Darien Police Commission at its meeting on Thursday. His account, part of a regular briefing of public safety incidents the department dealt with in the weeks leading up to the meeting, included accusations not proven in court.
In the incident, which occurred on Dec. 31, 2023, the man “was tasered and finally subdued,” Marron said. “[The] subject, clearly under the influence of narcotics,” was taken to a hospital. Police charged him with “numerous” violations of the law, he said.
As is comnon in the summary reports described in Police Commission meetings, Marron provided no further details, including the man’s name, the time of the incident or the charges against him.
“Captain, compliments to the officers for the incident on I-95,” Commissioner Brent Hayes said. “Not only did they save that individual’s life, but if he jumped over onto I-95, [they] probably saved a lot of other individuals as well.”
Many Cases of Narcotics, Erratic Behavior, Public Nakedness
A combination of stripping off clothes, acting strangely in public and paranoia have been associated with abuse of various drugs, according to news accounts from past decades up to the present.
Other common features in the same news accounts: running and fighting with police. Sometimes other people are assaulted.
According to an Aug. 21, 2008, article in the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review (“Warning: These drugs may cause nakedness”), there had recently been “Several reports of disoriented individuals stripping naked and defecating in public without any recollection of what they’d just done.”
A police officer who taught courses on illegal drugs at a police academy said the incidents were consistent with methamphetamine or PCP. According to the article, “Both drugs can raise a person’s core temperature so much they strip off their clothes to cool down.”
Reports of similar incidents (often without identifying the drugs) have continued through late last year :
—”Man who stripped naked on Disneyland ride was on drugs, police say” — an article on the Los Angeles KLTA-TV website from Nov. 26, 2023. The man was charged with being under the influence of a controlled substance which wasn’t identified.
— In Buffalo, New York “Naked man on LSD, cocaine and other substances charged for going into construction pit at new Bills stadium” was the headline of a Sept. 23, 2023 story on the WVIB-TV website.
—In Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a man “possibly under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs” was found naked in the snow with temperatures hovering below 30 degrees, according to a Feb. 9, 2023 report on the website of WTMJ radio. A police dog helping search for the man “discovered clothing littered throughout numerous backyards,” the report said.
Similar Behavior From a Synthetic Drug Used in Past Years
On June 16, 2015, a Washington Post article was published with the headline “The new drug that causes users to rip off their clothes and attack with super-human strength” described various incidents in Florida.
In one of them, the article said: “There was the man who shed his clothing and ran through a choked Fort Lauderdale intersection while dodging vehicles, police and an unknown number of imaginary attackers […]”
In these cases, a “designer drug” called “flakka” in Florida but more commonly known elsewhere as “gravel,” was said to be the reason for the strange behavior, and it was connected to about 300 incidents in Broward County alone in the first three months of 2015.
The Broward County Health Department described the effects of Flakka:
“Excited delirium, characterized by hyperthermia, where the body temperature increases to more than 105 degrees, and paranoia causes users to run wild. Flakka can cause individuals to believe that they are being chased or are on fire, causing them to act violently with adrenaline-heightened strength, sometimes requiring 4 to 5 law enforcement officers to restrain them.”
The Banyan Treatment Centers website said reports of incidents connected to flakka seemed to die out by 2016, apparently because it was replaced with other synthetic drugs called bath salts:
“Flakka was believed to have emerged as a replacement for bath salts, which are banned. Every time one kind of bath salt is banned, drug labs adjust the chemical composition to avoid legal detection for as long as possible. The adjusted composition may also explain why Flakka has seemed to disappear. After it was banned, similar synthetic drugs like Mojo have emerged.”