A man stripped and wandered the streets of Bay Ridge in the buff on April 4.
Stunned Ridgities watched in amazement as the naked man, who appeared to be on some sort of drug according to witnesses, strolled along Third Avenue near 73rd Street in his birthday suit.
“I was walking to a bodega and I had to double take,” said Lisa Torres, who lives on Colonial Road, a block over from where the incident occurred. “I couldn’t believe that he was butt naked. He looked really out of it — like he may have been on something. He clearly wasn’t in his right mind.”
And this isn’t the nudist’s first run in with trouble in the nabe. Two days prior, the man was spotted — clothed — harassing a young girl in a McDonald’s on the corner of 73rd Street, said a local who recognized the nude man’s mug.
“I immediately recognized him when I saw the photo,” said Dyker Heights resident Justin Adore. “I watched him pull up a chair to little girl in McDonald’s and then he started whispering things to her — she looked really uncomfortable. It was just very sketchy.”
In that incident, Adore confronted the man, who quickly fled the fast food joint, and then Adore waited with the girl until her sister returned from a nearby Rite Aid. And Adore has actually had run ins with the same man before when working at the Third Avenue Starbucks near Bay Ridge Parkway.
“I used to always see him go into the bathroom,” said Adore. “He would stay in there for hours. I think we was shooting up so many drugs that he would fall asleep in there. We’d have to bang on the door to get him to leave. So I definitely knew who he was.”
Bay Ridge is no stranger to addled streakers. In 2011, less than ten blocks up the avenue, a stark naked lady ransacked a Chinese restaurant, then ran out into the street began dancing, halted traffic, and drew hundreds of gawking Ridgites before the police hauled her away.
Police eventually arrived on the scene and cuffed the man last week, likely taking him to a local hospital, said a police spokesman.
“He’d have to be cuffed to be securely transported for his own safety and for the publics,” said detective Martin Speechley. “He was probably transferred to a hospital because normal people don’t walk around naked.”
