The Florida man who threw pamphlets in the air before dousing himself with accelerant and lighting himself on fire outside former President Donald Trump's criminal trial in Lower Manhattan has died from his injuries, according to police.
The NYPD confirmed to Patch on Saturday that Maxwell Azzarello, 37, was declared dead by staff at an area hospital.
Azzarello, who lived in St. Augustine, was in Collect Pond Park around 1:30 p.m. Friday. In a nearby courthouse, jury selection for Trump's hush-money trial was wrapping up inside a courtroom, authorities said.
Azzarello took out multi-colored pamphlets and scattered them before lighting himself on fire, a horrifying scene captured live by several news outlets reporting outside the courthouse. The flyers linked to an online manifesto with the heading: "I have set myself on fire outside the Trump Trial."
"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," the manifesto stated.
Bystanders struggled to reach Azzarello, who was behind barricades, videos show and police officials said.
In her live report, CNN's Laura Coates said Azzarello remained on fire after bystanders tried to smother the flames with their jackets. She said someone eventually ran up with a fire extinguisher.
Those details were broadly confirmed by officials, including FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, who said four people were exposed to flames besides Azzarello but were uninjured.
Medics rushed Azzarello to a New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center burn unit, Kavanagh said.
A reporter at the scene posted that the pamphlet's linked to a Substack called "The Ponzi Papers."
The Substack's writer identifies himself as Max Azzarello, an "investigative researcher" and contends to find proof of a vast conspiracy involving billionaire Peter Thiel, cryptocurrency, NYU and "The Simpsons."
A 2023 federal lawsuit, also filed by a person named Max Azzarello, contains similar accusations of a vast "Ponzi scheme." The lawsuit's dozens of defendants include the Clinton Foundation, Mark Zuckerberg, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the late Ross Perot.
In an interview with the New York Times, Azzarello's friends called him a caring person whose paranoia led him down a dark path.
“He was super curious about social justice and the way things ‘could’ be,” former classmate Katie Brennan told the Times. “He was creative and adventurous.”
Larry Altman, the property manager at his apartment building in St. Augustine, called him "an extremely nice person." But Altman also told the Times that Azzarello had "political views that I would not consider mainstream. He called our government and the world government a Ponzi scheme."