Prominent local civil rights activist set himself on fire near Santa Cruz City Hall; the motive is unclear

A prominent community and civil rights activist set himself on fire last week near Santa Cruz City Hall, just hours after President Donald Trump took his oath of office and a heavily attended Martin Luther King Jr. Day march had cleared in downtown Santa Cruz on Jan. 20. 

Firefighters extinguished the flames while the activist was standing atop the Black Lives Matter street mural in front of city hall. The person was badly burned and airlifted to a nearby trauma unit, according to police and fire scanners.

Lookout was able to confirm the activist’s identity with multiple sources, but has chosen to withhold his name to give the local family privacy at this time. 

Lookout has chosen to cover the story because of the significance behind public self-immolation, the day, the location, and the person involved, who is a well-known local activist heavily involved in the police reform and Black civil rights movements that followed George Floyd’s murder.

He was seen earlier in the day during the annual MLK Day march in downtown Santa Cruz, during which more than 1,000 people came out to commemorate the life of America’s most famous civil rights leader. 

In an apparently separate incident, four days later and only blocks away, police responded to another call of a person pouring gasoline on themselves near the intersection of Cathcart and Cedar streets in downtown Santa Cruz. The man did not set himself on fire; Santa Cruz police – in the vicinity due to an unrelated call – responded quickly and detained the man. The Santa Cruz Fire Department was also called to the scene. Lookout is also choosing not to name the person involved, and has been unable to obtain further clarifying information about the incident.

The condition of the injured activist is unclear, as is a motive: Police, fire, and city officials declined to offer any clarity beyond acknowledging the event occurred. Lookout’s multiple efforts to reach the activist’s family and gain context from numerous community leaders were largely unsuccessful. 

“​​The fire was quickly extinguished, and the individual was transported to receive medical attention,” Erika Smart, city spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. “The city will not be providing any further comment at this time.”

On Jan. 22, Smart told Lookout the police and fire departments were working “diligently to investigate the details of the incident.” Over the next five days, Lookout regularly reached out to the police department for an update, but never received a response. “The City has no further comment at this time,” City Manager Matt Huffaker wrote in an email Monday evening. 

Staff at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, Natividad Medical Center in Salinas and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose told Lookout they didn’t have or couldn’t share records indicating the activisit was a patient at those facilities.

Lookout attempted to reach both the activist and his family. A woman who answered the door at an address listed for the person declined to comment.

The incident unfolded on a downtown street late afternoon during a national holiday. 

According to the fire and police scanners, at about 4:20 p.m. on Jan. 20, the Santa Cruz Fire Department responded to “a man who lit themselves on fire” near the intersection of Church and Center streets, in front of Santa Cruz City Hall. Police officers soon arrived at the request of fire officials and blocked off the stretch of Center Street between Church and Locust Street. According to the fire and police scanner, the activist’s car was parked nearby. 

Drew Harris, 23, of Vacaville, told Lookout he witnessed the incident. In town for a Santa Cruz Warriors basketball game, he and a friend had just left Kaiser Permanente Arena and were searching for parking en route to The Penny Ice Creamery when he heard a fire truck siren. As the pair drove through the intersection at Locust and Center streets, Harris said he saw a person fully engulfed in flames, spinning around atop the Black Lives Matter street mural. The mural has been painted on the street since 2020.

“I saw it from the car, and as I parked to get out, the flames got extinguished,” said Harris, who had left his car in the middle of the road when he saw the scene. Harris said he remained in the area, as one of the only eyewitnesses he had seen, for “probably 45 minutes to an hour,” expecting to be questioned by the police. He said he was surprised when the police didn’t approach him to take his statement. 

Over the course of several days, Lookout reached out to many of the man’s friends and fellow community activists, as well as elected officials. All declined to comment on the record.

On Sunday, several Lookout employees received a letter demanding Lookout not publish the story, urging others to stop engaging with the news organization and requesting that “all profits from this article be directly allocated to grief counseling services for the Black/BIPOC community and reimbursement for any incurred community grievance counseling costs.” The letter included the names of 29 supporters and several organizations, including Esabella Bonner of Black Surf Santa Cruz, Inc., Theresa Cariño of Salud y Cariño, Pamela Sexton of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and Stephanie Barron Lu of Women in Leadership for Diverse Representation (WILDR). 

Lookout has chosen to run this news story without advertisements, and with full access for all.

“We feel compelled to tell you this happened, to report such tragedies as thoroughly as we can and to try to make sense of these troubling acts,” Lookout CEO Ken Doctor wrote in a column published Tuesday. “That is what journalists do, covering the good, the bad and sometimes deeply distressing.”

The motive in this instance is unclear. However, self-immolation is often a form of protest, which began to appear in the 1960s after Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk, lit himself on fire in protest of the South Vietnam government’s oppression of Buddhists, in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1963. 

In the United States, hundreds of people have self-immolated since the 1960s and 1970s – when many people said they acted in protest against the Vietnam War, Jon Coburn, a lecturer in American history at the University of Lincoln, wrote in an April 2024 article for the nonprofit news outlet The Conversation. 

In recent years, people who self-immolated have said they did so to raise awareness on a range of issues from climate change and Palestine to civil rights. In February 2024, an active duty airman lit himself on fire outside the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C., shouting, “Free Palestine!” and that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

On Earth Day in 2022, a climate activist lit himself on fire outside of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington. A friend of his at the time said on Twitter it was a “deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to [the] climate crisis.”

If you or someone you know needs emotional support, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.