A man who set himself on fire outside a Manhattan courthouse during former President Donald Trump’s so-called hush money trial has died from his injuries, police said.
Max Azzarello, a 37-year-old resident of St. Augustine, Florida, carried out the act of self-immolation on the afternoon of April 19 in Collect Pond Park, located across the street from the courthouse that has been a gathering point for demonstrators and media outlets covering jury selection for the trial.
He threw a stack of pamphlets in the air before pulling out a canister, soaking himself in a liquid that police believe was an “accelerant,” and setting himself on fire in front of horrified witnesses.
Emergency responders were quick to arrive and put out the blaze, but the man suffered severe burns. He was rushed to the hospital, but hours after being admitted to a burn unit, he was declared dead.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said they did not believe the incident had anything to do with President Trump’s trial, although it did raise concerns over security in the area.
In a news briefing, NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey told reporters that the department will review security protocol because of the “gravity of the event going on,” referring to the high-profile trial.
“We’re very concerned,” Chief Maddrey said, noting that Mr. Azzarello didn’t breach any security checkpoints in accessing the park, given that it is a public space.
“Of course, we’re going to look at everything.
A Conspiracy Theorist
A self-proclaimed “investigative researcher,” Mr. Azzarello traveled to New York City earlier in the week from Florida without his family knowing, according to the police.In a nearly 3,000-word rambling manifesto posted on his blog, he said that he would be carrying out the extreme act to “draw attention to an urgent and important discovery.” Mr. Azzarello’s Substack manifesto directs outrage to a wide array of subjects, ranging from cryptocurrency, New York University, “The Simpsons,” the Clinton family, and the U.S. government and its allies.
“We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” he told his readers. “These claims sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy.”
Describing what he called a “Ponzi scheme,” Mr. Azzarello claimed that the Democrat–Republican adversarial relationship “has been entirely manufactured.”
Ever since the 1996 election that saw former President Bill Clinton’s victory, he claimed, presidential candidates of the rival parties had been secretly collaborating, merely “acting as characters that are against one another” in a way akin to scripted wrestling matches.
“Both parties are run by financial criminals whose only goals are to divide, deceive, and bleed us dry,” he wrote. “They divide the public against itself and blame the other party while everything gets worse and more expensive and [a] handful of people take all the money.”
In addition, Mr. Azzarello claimed that he had discovered that “elites” had been funneling “trillions of dollars in stolen cash through the stock market” to create “the largest stock-market anomaly in history.” He claimed that the U.S. government “unleashed COVID on the world” to “explain the massive anomaly.”
In the pamphlet that he threw out before setting himself on fire, Mr. Azzarello wrote that his goal was to abolish the government and replace it with one that “serves all.”
The NYPD has dismissed the pamphlets as “propaganda-based” material.
“[It was] almost a conspiracy theory type of pamphlet ... [including] some information in regard to a Ponzi scheme, and the fact that some of our local educational institutes are fronts for the mob,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters.
