A man walked onto the Ellipse park in downtown Washington, D.C., Wednesday afternoon while the tourist trap was bustling with people and lit himself on fire, the U.S. Secret Service confirmed in a tweet.
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According to CNBC, the unidentified man walked on to the “52-acre park area that lies south of the White House and north of the National Mall, in the heart of Washington” and just lit himself ablaze.
Secret Service spokesman Jeffrey Adams told CNBC that Uniformed Division Officers “responded in seconds” after the “male individual lit himself on fire.” The fire was put out and officers administered first aid to the man before he was transported to a local hospital.
“I can confirm that we’ve transported one patient with burns from the Ellipse and we’re now on the scene assisting law enforcement,” a spokesman for the Washington Fire Department told CNBC.
There was no information given about the man’s condition.
Imagines of the burning man were captured and shared on social media as many were stunned to see a man burning on the Ellipse.
“We saw this man” on the Ellipse and “he starts running, and then we saw him covered in flames,” Alina Berzins, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate from Lorton, Va., told CNBC.
“He started to walk” and then “cops started coming to the area and he collapsed,” Berzins told the news station that the fire was extinguished.
“Everybody was in shock,” Berzins said. “I was in shock.”
Berzins father, Krisjan, posted video of the burning man to Twitter.
A White House spokesman had no immediate comment, and it remains unclear if the man set himself on fire in protest against President Donald Trump.
In 2017, a 45-year-old man set himself ablaze in front of Trump Hotel on Pennsylvania Ave, in Washington, D.C. While no motive was found in that fire, a construction worker told a Washington Post reporter that he heard the man uttering Trump’s name before he was engulfed in flames.
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