(ProsperNews.net) – The man who set himself alight outside the courthouse where Donald Trump is on trial has been confirmed dead. A spokesperson for the New York Police Department (NYPD) told reporters that 37-year-old Maxwell Azzarello died from severe burns on the evening of April 19 after setting himself on fire in Collect Pond Park.
The incident happened around 1:30 p.m, with witnesses reportedly seeing Azzarello rummaging through a backpack and removing pamphlets, which he threw into the air. Immediately after that, he took fire accelerant from the bag, poured it over himself, and used a lighter to ignite it. Bystanders and law enforcement officers rushed to Azzarello’s aid and managed to extinguish the flames. They rushed him to the hospital, from where he was transferred to a specialized burns center in Manhattan. Four officers were injured in the rescue attempt.
Police later said they did not believe Azzarello, from St. Augustine, Florida, was targeting Donald Trump and described the pamphlets as containing conspiracy theories. Photos of the dead man protesting outside the courthouse showed him holding up a placard saying, “Trump is with Biden, and they’re about to fascist coup us.”
On a Substack page, a link to which was included on his pamphlets, Mr. Azzarello described himself as an “investigative researcher.” A registered Democrat, he graduated from the University of North Carolina in 2009 and obtained a Master’s Degree from Rutgers in 2012. Friends described him as intelligent, creative, well-informed, and kind.
His family noted that he left for the Big Apple precisely two years after his mother died from heart disease. Friends described her death as having an enormous impact on Azzarello, with one portraying him as going “a little haywire.”
Last August, he wrote on social media that he spent three days in a psychiatric facility after throwing a glass of wine at a photograph of Bill Clinton in a hotel. He later returned to the hotel dressed only in his underwear.
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