Naked Man Attacks Riders at San Francisco BART Station
A video emerged Monday depicting a bizarre incident at a San Francisco BART station last month, with a naked man accosting several passengers and doing flips, handstands, the splits and other gymnastic maneuvers on the BART turnstiles.
The video, recorded May 10 by a BART station agent at the 16th Street Mission Station, shows the man lunge at and attack several passengers, and at one point pound the ground while passengers step gingerly around him.
The video also shows a BART maintenance worker trying to block the man from getting close to passengers. The station agent recording the video helps one woman, who is visibly distressed, hide from the man in the booth.
"Oh my God, I cannot believe that," the station agent is heard saying as the man does a handstand.
The man was identified by BART police as 24-year-old Yeiner Garizabalo. Friends said Tuesday he goes by Yeiner Perez and is a dedicated acrobat and performer. The episode, they said, was strongly out of character.
"He's been through a lot of stress — he seems to have been having a breakdown," said Slim Chance, who leads the Berkeley circus troupe ClownSnotBombs. Perez was a member from January to early May. "That seems to be the tip of it right there. I just can't tell you anything more because I don't really know what his state is. It's not at all like his normal character."
Chance said Perez, normally a "workaholic acrobat," stopped showing up to the group's practices several days before the episode.
"I don't think it was anything with drugs," Chance said. "I don't know. We're thinking he may have even had a stroke sometime last year. We've been trying to piece it together ourselves."
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