SAN JOSE -- Andrew Martinez, who gained fame while a UC Berkeley student by refusing to wear clothes and walking through the East Bay city naked, died this week in a maximum security cell at the Santa Clara County jail.

A jail officer found the 33-year-old Cupertino man lying on his bunk bed around 11:19 p.m. Wednesday, after some other inmates reported hearing unusual sounds coming from the man's single-occupancy cell.

According to jail officials, Martinez had recent contact with mental health professionals and apparently committed suicide by pulling a plastic bag tight over his head and securing it with a bed sheet.

"He was in a maximum security area, where checks are made hourly,'' Department of Correction spokesman Mark Cursi said. "He was a high level security inmate because he had a history of assaultive behavior.''

Correction officials unsuccessfully attempted to resuscitate the man before transporting him to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 12:16 a.m. Thursday.

Martinez brought the 2-gallon plastic bag to his cell after purchasing some personal items, like toiletries, from the jail, Cursi said.

The jail allows inmates to purchase some commodities and carry them in plastic bags. Cursi said this is the first time an inmate has used one of the bags in an apparent suicide.

Martinez had been in custody since Jan. 10 when he was arrested and subsequently charged with two counts of felony battery and one count of felony assault with a deadly weapon.

Cursi said the man had seen mental health professionals in the last couple of weeks. He declined to comment on why the man saw them.

The medical examiner will conduct an autopsy to establish Martinez's cause and manner of death. If confirmed by the medical examiner, this case would be the first to commit suicide in the county jail this year. Last year, two inmates committed suicide in the county jail.

The Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office will investigate the death, Department of Correction will conduct an internal administrative investigation.

Martinez gained famed in the early 1990s by attending class at the University of California at Berkeley in the buff. In the fall of 1992, he organized a "Nude-In'' on UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza. He was expelled from Berkeley and arrested after the city adopted a law outlawing public nudity in 1992.