Sarah Hayes realized something was wrong as soon as she noticed the strange man, red in the face and breathing heavily, sitting at a computer near her.

Hayes was studying with a friend on the fourth floor in the Charles V. Park Library on Tuesday night.

The following events could only be described as "weird" by the Bellaire senior, who had a front-row seat to a spectacle that captured the attention of the entire building.

"I thought he was having a heart attack," Hayes said, who approached the man after he began to stumble away from his computer toward the bookstacks. "He turned around and he was crying and holding a clear crystal in his hand."

It was about 8:30 p.m. and the man, Chad Blakley Pell, a Prudenville resident, was having a very bad day. Gratiot County Court Judge Jeffrey Martlew had issued a bench warrant for his arrest that morning, Pell's third such warrant in the last two years for falling behind on child support payments.

Students would later tell Central Michigan University Police detectives that Pell, 37, had been composing a "love letter" and doing some kind of religious research in the library that night, which ended with Pell in the Gratiot County Jail, 226 East Center St.

Before he got there, he would be physically restrained by a decisive student onlooker after shouting apocalyptic statements to the entire library.

The fourth floor was taking notice as Hayes approached Pell, who told her, crying, that he needed a piece of paper.

"He was annoying me, really, because I was trying to do homework," said Cameron Charron, a Burton junior who was studying nearby. "Then he got down on his knees and started sobbing really hard."

Hayes raced downstairs. By the time she had returned with a library staff member, Pell was shaking and praying very loudly.

"He started yelling 'God, I've passed your test,'" she said.

Then Pell stood up and moved briskly toward his belongings at the computers near the elevators on the library's south side.

He grabbed what looked to Hayes like a handful of black rocks in his right hand, and a teardrop-shaped clear crystal of some kind in his left. Then he strode over to the railing overlooking the building's circular atrium and stretched his arms out in a cross.

"He was yelling about how we were being judged and God was watching us. He had the library's full attention," she said. "At first we thought he was going to jump."

Hayes and her friend, Mallory Esch, got underneath their desk. Esch dialed 9-1-1.

Then Pell threw the thing in his left hand, which shattered on the ground floor tiles. He started back toward his computer and that was the last straw for Charron.

"I thought, 'Oh crap, now he's going to grab a computer and throw it,'" he said.

Charron approached from behind and snaked his arms around Pell's shoulders, placing him in a full-nelson arrest and stepped backward, sweeping Pell's feet from underneath him.

Telling him to relax, Charron face-planted Pell and held him there with minimal struggle until campus police arrived five minutes later.

Officers took Pell into custody, discovering the bench warrant.

Sgt. Cameron Wassman determined that Pell was no longer a threat to himself or others and disposed of the shattered glass on the ground floor, which had not hurt anyone and contained nothing harmful.

Wassman then drove Pell to Ithaca, where he was lodged overnight in the Gratiot County Jail. Pell stood before Judge Martlew at 9 a.m. Thursday morning.

According to court documents, Pell was behind several thousand dollars in child support. He was divorced in 2003 and his ex-wife has primary physical custody of their two children.

No charges are being issued for the incident in the library.

"The man violated no laws as far as our jurisdiction goes," said CMU Detective Sgt. Mike Morrow. "I don't know if what he did fits the elements of (disturbing the peace)."

After giving statements to police, Hayes, Esch and other witnesses left the library that night very confused.

"In my six years of being here, I've never had that entertaining of an evening at the library," Hayes said.

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