By Matthew Hendley
Seriously, Tempe: put down the bath salts, and put on your clothes.
For the third time this week, Tempe police have arrested a naked person doing really weird things, and in each case, the person in question told police they had ingested the chemicals known as “bath salts.”
The latest naked bath salts adventure occurred in the bathroom of Tempe’s Xtreme Bean Coffee Company, where police say 18-year-old Noah McQueen was fighting imaginary bugs.
Tempe Police Sergeant Jeffrey Glover tells New Times that store employees noticed McQueen seemed jittery and nervous yesterday when he walked into the store, and he headed straight for the bathroom.
McQueen then barricaded himself inside the bathroom, causing enough of a stir for the cops to be called.
Glover says police noticed McQueen was acting delusional, and he was “convinced that he was being eaten alive by bugs.”
After police broke down the door, not only was McQueen confused as to why no one else could see the “bugs” on him, but he’d also stripped naked and covered the bathroom in “quite a bit of blood,” Glover says.
(We’ve seen a couple pictures; the bathroom looked a few pints short of a murder scene.)
McQueen had done “quite a number” on the bathroom, Glover says, including breaking the mirror and just generally trashing the place.
Police were able to calm McQueen down, and he was taken to the hospital for all of his injuries, including his admitted ingestion of bath salts, Glover says.
McQueen hasn’t yet been booked into jail, and apparently is still in the hospital.
Glover says McQueen’s facing a criminal damage charge.