Man Who Lit Himself Up Outside Trump Trial Is Dead

The man who set himself on fire outside a New York City courthouse while the trial in former President Donald Trump’s hush money case was being held on Friday has succumbed to his injuries.

Man Who Torched Himself Outside Trump Trial Dies https://t.co/CFzEnMZjs5 pic.twitter.com/vxEi8qe2ia

— Daily Wire News (@DailyWireNews) April 20, 2024

As the jury selection process in Trump’s case went on, Max Azzarello, 37, doused himself with a liquid substance said to be an accelerant and lit himself up. Before lighting himself on fire, he reportedly threw pamphlets into the air, according to witnesses.

While first responders jumped in to extinguish the fire as soon as possible before rushing him into an ambulance, witnesses say that he got burnt in the fire for a while, per Reuters.

As seen in photos, he had suffered extreme burns all over his body. While he was taken to a hospital burn unit for treatment of his wounds, he succumbed to them hours later.

Per The New York Times, Azzarello was “curious” about social justice and was a “good friend and person” who “cared about the world.” However, he changed after his mother died in 2020 from pulmonary diseases, according to his friends.

He would become a left-wing conspiracy theorist who had multiple run-ins with law enforcement, one of which had him “standing outside [a] hotel in just his underwear, ranting and cursing into a bullhorn.”

Azzarello explained the reason for his action in an over 2500-word manifesto, titled, “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump trial.”

“My name is Maz Azzarello and I am an investigative researcher who had set himself on fire outside the Trump trial in Manhattan,” he said, claiming that his action was to “draw attention to an urgent and important discovery.”

“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. These claims sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy,” he said.

Some of his theories include a claim that billionaires, Stanford, Silicon Valley, Harvard, cryptocurrency and Facebook are all involved in a vast “Ponzi scheme” and that bank failures are all ploys “to move out stolen Ponzi money.”

He also claimed that the coronavirus pandemic was unleashed by the U.S. government to “explain” a massive anomaly created by the funneling of “trillions of dollars in stolen cash through the stock market” by “elites.”

According to Azzarello, the television show, “The Simpsons” were part of a conspiracy “to brainwash us,” adding that the show “served the interests of organized crime.”