A pro skateboarder was sprung from jail today after promising to pay back the nearly $3,000 in damage he caused during a nutty naked rampage at the Shelburne hotel in Midtown.
“I became something other than myself,” a soft-spoken, tattoo-bedecked Jereme Rogers, 26, explained with a laugh, as he left Manhattan Criminal Court. “I became something like The Hulk.”
Rogers — named rookie of the year in 2005 by Skateboarding magazine and still a top competitor — was freed after spending five days at Rikers Island and promised a no-jail sentence after agreeing to pay back at least half what he owes the hotel before his next court date on Jan. 31.
He’d been caught on the morning of Jan. 5 rampaging nude in the hotel hallway. He pleaded guilty today to misdemeanor criminal mischief for admittedly smashing and tearing at three paintings he’d yanked off the walls.
“They were nice,” he said of his Rikers companions. “Not all people in jail are bad.”
“I was not on angel dust, by the way,” he told reporters. “Though I was incoherent. It was a little bit of drinking and a girl that I was drinking with gave me two pills that she said were hangover pills. But they weren’t.”
“I don’t know what they were, actually.”
Rogers, who say’s he’s from “heaven, then Boston, then LA,” admits he has had some other brushes with the law — like the time he was busted for assault for poking a bouncer in the chest with his index finger in Orange County, Florida four years ago.
Then there was the gun and DUI bust from from Los Angeles in 2007.
“They realized that the gun was registered and that I blew under the limit, so they got me for reckless driving,” he said.
Now, though, Rogers insists that he will never have a drink of alcohol again, for all his days.
“At the time that I was doing something destructive, I felt like I was saving the world,” he said of his naked rampage.
It wasn’t until he was strapped to a gurney that he realized, “Alright, I didn’t save the world,” he said with a smile. “And that now I have to do this. Crap.”
“God bless you,” he told reporters before walking off. “God bless you all.”