The great city by the bay, San Francisco, has a long and colorful history of drug use, some of which has contributed to spontaneous cultural revolution, while others have contributed to significant crime and other unsavory problems.
A May, 2014 San Francisco drug adventure by a man named Santonio Aviles would probably fall into the latter category. Aviles is being accused of breaking into an apartment for nefarious purposes. However, Aviles’s attorneys turned his drug use into a defense, claiming Aviles didn’t mean to break into the apartment since he was actually trying to board a spaceship on the apartment’s roof, reports SF Gate .
Maybe Aviles thought he really was trying to get on a spaceship. Stranger things certainly have happened in San Francisco. Regardless, the defense worked, and the spaceship-boarding Aviles was acquitted.
According to Aviles’ defense attorneys, the 41-year-old San Francisco man was suffering from a “meth-induced psychosis” at the time of the aprtment-robbing, spaceship-boarding incident. A witness for the defense explained that meth-induced psychosis could severely cripple one’s reality with extreme hallucinations, paranoia, and other delusions.
Aviles’ meth-induced San Francisco spaceship adventure reportedly began when he was able to talk his way into a building via a compliant resident, reports the Huffington Post .
Aviles reportedly thought the world was going to end and that a spaceship he saw on top of the building was his ticket to survival.
Having gained entry, Aviles then spied an open apartment window that was just a fire escape’s climb away. Aviles was able to climb inside and find a place to stretch out for a quick nap.
Apparently rested and reinvigorated by his brief respite, Aviles began his spaceship mission anew, hurling a hippity-hop -sized exercise ball out onto the fire-escape from where he planned to launch out into other galaxies, the ball acting as his interstellar transport. Whether space travel by inflatable exercise ball was an alternative or backup plan to boarding the spaceship on top of the apartment was not made clear.
However, Aviles did gather some things from the apartment, including a woman’s passport, which he testified would reserve him a seat aboard the spaceship. Exercise ball or not, the spaceship still played a pivotal role in Aviles’s space travel plans.
Unfortunately for Aviles and his scheduled voyage aboard the spaceship, the man and woman who lived in the apartment awoke and put a stop to the whole arrangement. The man reportedly beat Aviles with his fists while the woman delivered blows with a baseball bat. The two also called 911.
Injuries to Aviles included numerous bruises, scratches, scrapes, and a black eye, while the male apartment resident got a hurt toe and some kind of rash.
According to the Aviles’ defense attorneys, the hopeful space traveler was deemed “delusional, paranoid and hallucinating” as officers put him in handcuffs.
“Mr. Aviles did not enter the building to rob or hurt anyone,” said Aviles’s public defender, Jacque Wilson. “This was not the act of a violent criminal but a frightened man in the midst of a mental health crisis.”
While Aviles was let off charges of robbery, attempted robbery, assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury, and battery with serious bodily injury, he did still receive convictions for misdemeanor battery and assault stemming from his meth-induced spaceship notion.
[Image by Justin Sullivan, Getty Images]