St. Augustine man lights himself on fire outside Trump trial in New York
A man from St. Augustine, Florida set himself on fire on Friday afternoon outside of the Manhattan courthouse where the criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump is underway.
Maxwell Azzarello, 37, was seen throwing “conspiracy” pamphlets at Collect Pond Park just before he doused himself with accelerant and lit himself on fire, New York police said at a press conference on Friday.
He is in critical condition at a New York hospital.
Police said Azzarello’s motivations are still under investigation. They are currently looking through all his social media accounts and online history. While it has yet to be determined if his actions were in protest to Trump’s trial, police said Azzarello did post about the event before he set himself ablaze.
Azzarello was last seen in St. Augustine on April 13, police said.
He is believed to have arrived in New York City early this week, and was photographed by the New York Times at the same park on Thursday with a sign that read: “Trump is with Biden and they’re about to fascist coup us.”
On Friday, Azzarello published a manifesto on the online platform Substack explaining he set himself on fire: as an “extreme act of protest to draw attention” to his discovery of a “totalitarian con” involving cryptocurrency where both political parties “are run by financial criminals whose only goals are to divide, deceive, and bleed us dry.”
“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,” Azzarello wrote in the anti-government manifesto.
Some of Azzarello’s social media accounts have already been suspended, including his Reddit account. A review of his Instagram account shows he was trying to draw attention to his manifesto as early as March 20.
