Michael Reed, Tulsa's 10 Commandments Statue Destroyer, Strikes Again In Little Rock

LITTLE ROCK, AK — Michael Tate Reed II, a 32-year-old resident of Van Buren, Ark., has been arrested and charged with felony "defacing an object of public interest" after ramming his car into a controversial, day-old monument of the Ten Commandments erected on the Arkansas Capitol lawn, according to state police. (Want more local news? Sign up here to receive free newsletters and breaking alerts from the Tulsa Patch.)

Reed also apparently posted a manifesto explaining his actions to Facebook right before the Wednesday-morning crash — then streamed the act itself on Facebook Live.

Watch both videos below.

"Oh, my goodness — FREEDOM!" Reed yells as he rams his sedan into the monument.

And this may not be his first rodeo. In 2014, Reed was arrested and charged with ramming his then-truck into a similar Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol in Tulsa, Okla., according to a local paper. After that crash, he was reportedly institutionalized for mental health issues. "Michael Tate Reed II stated in a letter that his psychotic breaks led to getting inspiration from a Dracula movie, thinking Michael Jackson’s spirit was in meat, believing he was the incarnation of an occult leader and attempting to contact Lucifer’s high priestess he called Gwyneth Paltrow," Tulsa World reported.

Reed explained in his Facebook manifesto that although he's a devout Christian, he also believes in the separation of church and state, and doesn't agree with a list of religious principles being erected on government grounds.

"I'm using my own car that I paid for... it's a 2016 Dodge Dart that I really enjoy," he said in the pre-crash video. Reed then asked viewers to give him money on GoFundMe so he could buy a new car once his Dodge was wrecked. (The crowdfunding campaign has since been removed from GoFundMe.com.)

"Our constitutional rights have been violated and since no one will do anything about it, I will," he wrote in another Facebook post.

Little Rock's short-lived Ten Commandments monument, standing around 6 feet tall, was installed Tuesday morning after two years of heated debate among state legislators and community members, according to the Associated Press.

State Sen. Jason Rapert, an Arkansas Republican, said he was "grateful" to see his vision become a reality:

Opponents of the monument, including the ACLU of Arkansas, had said they planned to sue — although Reed may have saved them the trouble Wednesday morning.

At one point in the debate, members of the Satanic Temple reportedly got involved, threatening to erect a competing statue of Baphomet — a biblical creature with a goat's head and angel wings — with two small children smiling up at it. (That plan, however, was blocked by local politicians, the AP reported.)

By Wednesday afternoon, the statue's shards had been carted off the lawn, said Chris Powell, a spokesman for the Arkansas Capitol Police and the Secretary of State's Office.

"The monument just went up first thing yesterday morning," Powell told Patch. "And at about a quarter to 5, at 4:47 a.m., someone drove onto the grounds and drove their car into the monument, and knocked it over and destroyed it."

A few nearby police officers witnessed the crash, the spokesman said, and arrested the driver — later identified as Michael Reed — at the scene.

Reed has since been charged with "defacing an object of public interest" and "criminal mischief," both Class C felonies, as well as "criminal trespassing," a misdemeanor.

In another Facebook Live video posted to his feed, Reed describes a bizarre run-in with the police a day or two before this all went down, in which he makes references to his love of religious rituals, smoking large amounts of weed and other slightly delusional-sounding stuff. Watch for yourself:

Lead photo courtesy of the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office