Naked walk through Carrs nets homeless man 8 months in jail

PALMER — When he strode naked from the waist down through the Carrs grocery store in January, Mihai Cosma told a judge Wednesday he was really just looking for a warm place to stay.

“I’d been napping at the police station and the car wash,” Cosma said of his living arrangements on Jan. 19, the day he walked into the Palmer Carrs without pants or underwear. “It was extremely cold outside.”

When he ran out of places to go and a ride to Anchorage fell through, he figured the only option he had left was jail. When he lived in Colorado, he said people used to do that all the time.

“They provoke a misdemeanor and go to prison for the winter,” he said.

Prosecutor Trina Sears said her initial recommendation had been very little jail time and lots of supervised probation.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Cosma doesn’t want probation and won’t agree to it,” she said

So the deal she reached with him was eight months to serve and no probation.

She said the goal of the sentencing should be to condemn Cosma’s actions and to deter him from doing it again.

“He took his pants and underwear off and walked around the store in front of children,” she said. And when a store manager asked him to go to the bathroom if he wouldn’t put his clothes on, “he chose not to do that and chose to exhibit himself where there were parents and kids.”

Documents Palmer police filed in the case show that a mother did see Cosma and covered her child’s eyes as she hurried away.

“(The manager) told him again that he needed to put his pants on or leave the store and he said, ‘no, I am going to wait here for the police,’” Officer Colt Graham wrote in that document.

Cosma’s attorney, Hannah Thorssin-Bahri, pointed out that her client came to the court hearing with a lot of positive news to report about his rehabilitation. He’d started taking medications, decided to reapply for Social Security and lined up housing for after his release. She pointed out that her client was relatively subdued.

“Mr. Cosma was not making any obscene gestures, he wasn’t harassing any individuals at Carrs,” she said. “He has been homeless and needed a warm place to go for the winter.”

In 2007, Cosma was convicted of indecent exposure in Colorado but most assembled for his hearing Wednesday agreed that was an unrelated incident. Cosma had been trying to leave a homeless shelter and had torn off his clothes in protest when he couldn’t get out.

“To say the least this is a very unusual fact pattern and an unusual motivation,” Superior Court Judge Gregory Heath said in accepting the plea deal.

When Cosma interjected that it is not uncommon in Colorado, Heath replied there was precedent in his experience for someone purposely getting arrested in search of a trip to jail.

“But there is no precedent for the type of conduct that you did in order to get arrested,” he told Cosma.

In addition to the eight months in prison, Heath ordered Cosma never to set foot in Palmer Carrs again. He said he hoped Cosma was serious in wanting to turn his life around.

“That’s my encouragement to you, to stay on your medications,” he said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.