‘Conspiracy theorist’ Max Azzarello dead after setting himself on fire across from Trump hush money trial
Troubled “conspiracy theorist” Max Azzarello died Friday night hours after he set himself on fire in a Manhattan park across the street from former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial, police said.
The 37-year-old Florida man succumbed to the severe burns he suffered following the sickening self-immolation inside Collect Pond Park.
He threw a stack of pamphlets in the air, including a link to a Substack newsletter, before he poured fuel on his body and ignited a lighter in front of horrified witnesses.
The self-described “investigative researcher” traveled to New York City in recent days from Florida without his family knowing and had been protesting in front of the courthouse where he bashed political leaders from both sides of the aisle.
“This extreme act of protest is 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,” Azzarello wrote in part of a rambling manifesto on the Substack page.
After the self-immolation, cops swarmed the area as an ambulance was close behind and he was brought to a nearby hospital’s burn unit in critical condition. But he died at around 10:30 p.m., police and sources said.
Azzarello was previously arrested three times across several days in the Sunshine State that included charges of disturbing the peace and damage to property last August.
Following his third arrest, Florida cops noted he was suicidal and listed him as unemployed, per police reports.
One witness who spoke to Azzarello and then minutes later saw him light himself on fire recalled the horrifying scene in an interview Friday.
“He was just standing there, and after a minute hit the ground. By the time the cops got there, all of the fuel had burnt off of his body, and you could see his skin,” 25-year-old start-up founder William Schoeffler said. “He didn’t make too much noise, he was very quiet. Pretty horrifying.”
