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Florida man who lit himself on fire outside Trump trial courthouse touted conspiracy theories

Molly Crane-Newman, Josephine Stratman, Rocco Parascandola and Thomas Tracy, New York Daily News on

Published in Political News

Word of the self-immolation occurred as prosecutors and Trump’s attorneys finished selecting the final alternate jurors for the hush money trial involving porn actress Stormy Daniels, which is expected to continue on Monday.

Gates said Azzarello was calm as he took two gas cans out of his backpack.

“(He) put them down on the ground, just slow, calm,” Gates recalled. “Then he took a bunch of fliers out of his backpack, threw them into the air and then he picked up one (can) and dumped it on himself and then he picked up another and dunked the other half of himself and by that time I was running.”

An investigation into the incident was continuing Friday.

A LinkedIn page in Azzarello’s name indicates he went to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 2005 and 2009. He also earned a master's of city and regional planning from Rutgers University.

His rambling screed touched on Ponzi schemes, bank failures, the rise of cryptocurrency, the television show “The Simpsons” and Harvard University, which he called “one of the largest organized crime fronts in history.”

 

“To my friends and family, witnesses and first responders, I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you,” Azzarello wrote about his alleged self-immolation. “But I assure you it is a drop in the bucket compared to what our government intends to inflict.”

NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Azzarello’s fliers were “propaganda based.”

“(It was) almost like a conspiracy theory type of pamphlet,” Kenny said. “It had information in regards to Ponzi schemes and that some of our local education institutes are fronts for the mob. There’s a bit of a conspiracy theory going on here.”

Azzarello has no criminal record in New York and he wasn’t on anyone’s radar, police said.

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