A police officer uses a fire extinguisher as emergency personnel respond to a report of a person covered in flames outside the courthouse where former U.S. president Donald Trump's criminal hush-money trial is underway in New York on April 19.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
A Florida man, promoting conspiracy theories, has died after setting himself on fire outside Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial Friday, closing down a designated protest zone across the street from the courthouse.
The self-immolation happened around the same time court finished selecting six alternate jurors for the trial, setting the stage for opening arguments to begin Monday in the historic first prosecution of a former U.S. president.
Around 1:30 p.m., a man identified by police as Maxwell Azzarello, 37, of St. Augustine, Fla., walked into a park on Center Street in Lower Manhattan. Witnesses told The Globe and Mail that he pulled pamphlets out of a bag and threw them in the air before dousing himself in liquid and setting himself ablaze.
Fred Gates, 60, who was taking a break from a bike ride in the park at the time, said the man appeared to have two boxy, gallon-sized cans of fluid. He said the man didn’t say anything before setting the fire. “By that time, I was running,” Mr. Gates said.
Part of the fire was videoed by some of the block-long bank of nearby news cameras trained on the courthouse.
Louie, a Trump supporter who has been in the park for most of the week, said the self-immolator appeared to be throwing the pamphlets at people in the area supporting Mr. Trump.
“I turned around and he was burning. The fire was going as high as antennas,” said Louie, 81, who declined to give his last name to The Globe. “He couldn’t stand that much longer. He fell down and he was shaking.”
Bystanders and some of the police officers guarding the courthouse put out the blaze with coats and fire extinguishers. Mr. Azzarello was taken away on a stretcher for treatment at Cornell Burn Center. He died a few hours later. Several police officers were treated for minor injuries including smoke inhalation.
The park is divided by police barriers into separate sections for pro- and anti-Trump protesters in a bid to keep demonstrations away from the front of the courthouse itself. It has been mostly empty this week; a few dozen people turned out for protests on Monday but the crowds had dwindled to a handful of Trump supporters by Friday.
Joe Kenny, chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, said the pamphlets that Mr. Azzarello was carrying outlined Ponzi schemes and accused New York universities of being run by the mafia. “It seemed to be propaganda based on a conspiracy theory,” he said.
Chief of detectives Kenny said Mr. Azzarello’s vehicle was last seen in St. Augustine on April 13 and his family was not aware that he was in New York.
A Substack post from Friday written under Mr. Azzarello’s name declared “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump trial” to draw attention to what he claimed was an “apocalyptic fascist world coup,” before launching into a rambling, 2,700-word explanation of a conspiracy involving everything from cryptocurrency to The Simpsons.
Police said they had not yet decided whether the incident necessitated heightened security measures around the trial. The proceedings are already protected by court police, with NYPD posted outside and parts of the surrounding streets fenced off.
As the trial let out after the end of jury selection, a smouldering pile of fabric remained in the protest area.
The process of picking alternate jurors – five men and women who will join the jury if any of its regular 12 members drop out – was mostly an exercise in Mr. Trump’s lawyers trying to exclude anyone who dislikes their client politically.
One man was dismissed after Susan Necheles, one of Mr. Trump’s barristers, confronted him with social-media posts referring to the former president as “egomaniacal, sociopathic” and “the devil.”
Both sides, meanwhile, argued over whether the prosecution can bring up Mr. Trump’s other legal cases if he testifies at trial.
Prosecutors contended that findings against him in lawsuits concerning fraud and sexual abuse were relevant to his credibility as a witness in the current case. Mr. Trump’s legal team said bringing up such matters was purely salacious to make the former president look bad. Judge Juan Merchan reserved his decision until Monday.
Afterward, he scolded Mr. Trump’s lawyers for repeatedly bringing motions asking him to reconsider earlier rulings. Among other things, they asked again for Justice Merchan to quit the case over his daughter having worked for Democratic candidates.
“At some point, you need to accept the court’s decisions,” he said. “We’re going to have opening statements on Monday morning. This trial is starting.”
The case involves accusations that Mr. Trump falsified business records to hide a US$130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence over an extramarital affair she says she had with Mr. Trump. The former president is accused of also breaking campaign finance rules in relation to the payment, which came the month before the 2016 election.