The man who set himself on fire outside a Manhattan courthouse where former President Donald Trump’s so-called hush money trial was proceeding 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 Friday afternoon 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 police believe was an “accelerant” and setting himself on fire in front of horrified witnesses.
Emergency responders were quick to arrive and put the blaze out, but the man suffered severe burns as he was rushed to the hospital. Hours after being admitted to a burn unit, he was declared dead.
The New York Police Department said they do not believe the incident has anything to do with President Trump’s trial, although it did raise concerns over the security in the area.
In a press briefing, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey told reporters that the NYPD will review security protocol because of the “gravity of the event going on,” referring to the high-profile trial.
“We’re very concerned,” Mr. 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,” the police chief said. “We’re going to reassess our security with our federal partners.”
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 the days leading to his self-inflammation, Mr. Azzarello appeared to have been protesting in front of the courthouse against political leaders from both sides of the aisle. He allegedly drove a vehicle emblazoned with a phrase that repeatedly shows up in his writings—”fascist coup”—and featured the name of his Substack blog, “Ponzi Papers.”
In a nearly 3,000-word rambling manifesto, Mr. Azzarello said that he carried out the extreme act to “draw attention to an urgent and important discovery.” His 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 adversary “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 handful of people take all the money.”
In addition, Mr. Azzarello claimed he discovered that “elites” have 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 he threw out before setting himself on fire, Mr. Azzarello said 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.
“The pamphlets appear to be propaganda-based, almost a conspiracy theory type of pamphlet,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters. “Some information in regards to a Ponzi scheme, and the fact that some of our local educational institutes are fronts for the mob.”
From The Epoch Times
