By Matthew Hendley
The Tempe Police Department was probably not messing around Wendesday when it issued a public warning about the chemicals known as “bath salts.”
After finding 23-year-old Sean-Paul Branscome slamming himself against walls and jogging around a Tempe neighborhood in the nude on Sunday after admittedly ingesting bath salts, the cops responded to another naked-man-on-bath-salts incident just two days later.
This time, police say it was Michael Hurtado admitting to using bath salts. Naturally, that admission only came after police say he crashed his truck, then got “fully naked,” hopped in someone else’s U-Haul truck, and started making out with the steering wheel.
According to court documents obtained by New Times, Hurtado, 21, crashed his Chevy truck into a parking garage gate at the Vue in Tempe, an apartment building that’s mostly filled with students from the nearby Arizona State University.
Police heard from a witness that Hurtado got out of his truck — “fully naked” — and hopped into an unlocked U-Haul truck that was in the parking lot.
The cops showed up and found just that, as Hurtado had locked himself inside the truck, according to the documents.
Police say Hurtado “was acting irrationally and rambling on about things that didn’t make sense while kissing the steering wheel of the U-Haul.”
When Hurtado was arrested and placed in the back of the police car, he started making out with the cage in the car too, according to the documents.
The officer writes that Hurtado later admitted to taking bath salts, and was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital before being cleared and booked into jail.
Both the Vue and the renter of the U-Haul truck were willing to aid in prosecution against Hurtado, according to the documents.
Court documents note that a DUI charge is pending against Hurtado, who’s an ASU student.
His bond was set at $1,800.
According to Hurtado’s Facebook page, he also told his friends that he “went crazy” in late 2010 after sampling “some codeine, then trees, then salvia.”
According to Hurtado’s post, he’d “never been that fukked (sic) up.”
[SlideDeck id=’55’ width=’100%’ height=’370px’]
