Thairie Ritchie vigil: Chants, remembrances and a demand for information

As a crowd in the hundreds spilled out from the Bike Church at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Spruce Street in downtown Santa Cruz and marched toward Santa Cruz City Hall on Sunday evening, people carried flowers, candles and photographs, and loudly chanted a name: Thairie Ritchie. 

Ritchie, 29, a prominent Black civil rights activist and community organizer, set himself on fire near city hall two weeks earlier, on Jan. 20, only hours after President Donald Trump’s inauguration and a Martin Luther King Jr. Day march had cleared from downtown. Ritchie stood atop the Black Lives Matter street mural on Center Street, engulfed in flames, when firefighters arrived and saved him. 

People began to gather for Sunday’s vigil at 4:30 p.m. inside the Bike Church courtyard. Event organizers encouraged the crowd, which ranged from elected officials to activists, and from babies to older couples holding hands, to write personal letters to Ritchie, who remains in the hospital with third-degree burns. As a recently organized GoFundMe page describes, Ritchie has “a long and challenging recovery ahead of him.” 

“This is what Thairie wants, this is what Thairie would have wanted,” local activist Ayo Banjo told the crowd at the Bike Church. “We won’t let Thairie’s message go without being heard. And this is his message becoming reality.” Banjo and others have increased their call for the City of Santa Cruz to release additional information about the incident – including its apparent political motives.

More than 300 people marched the eight blocks from the Bike Church to city hall, carried by a soundtrack of Nas and Wu-Tang Clan, and alternating chants of Ritchie’s name and “free Palestine.” The group blocked traffic along the route and shut down Center Street for more than an hour as it arrived atop the Black Lives Matter mural, laying flowers and candles between the V and E. 

Luna Bey, a friend of Ritchie’s who organized the vigil, told the crowd that earlier in the day, she spoke with Ritchie’s brother over the phone. 

“He said, ‘Luna, my brother is alive and he’s going to be OK,’” Bey said, encouraging the crowd to repeat Ritchie’s brother’s words. “My brother is alive, and he’s going to be OK.” 

Irene Juarez-O’Connell, local artist and friend of Ritchie, told the crowd she remembered standing in front of city hall with Ritchie during the protest marches that followed George Floyd’s 2020 murder. 

“The year after that and the year after that, Thairie always gathered us, and he would remind us of our power by getting us to chant three words,” Juarez-O’Connell said, urging the crowd to repeat the words with her. “Unity. Education. Political change.” 

Juarez-O’Connell was one of six speakers at the vigil, including Banjo, Bey and Ritchie’s close friend Juan Dominguez. The crowd remained gathered atop the mural until 7 p.m.

“I think it’s reflective of the community Thairie has built brick by brick; he is endlessly committed to community,” Bey told Lookout. “Although I’m a friend of his, I didn’t know the majority of these people here. It just shows you the impact and the range of the lives he’s touched, and his message of unity.” 

Although no evidence about his motives have been made public, many have viewed Ritchie’s self-immolation as a defiant protest. Ritchie had become a fixture among local activists, rising to prominence for his work in the police reform and civil rights movements following Floyd’s murder. Police and city officials have continued to refuse to release any information about the incident, including letters explaining his motives Ritchie is believed to have left in his car. 

Friends believe Ritchie had been planning the self-immolation for months. 

Banjo told Lookout that Ritchie had been recently talking about “stepping back” and that “he was at his capacity.” Reflecting on those conversations from last year, Banjo said he now believes Ritchie was contemplating the act even then. 

“I think he was grappling with this decision for a while,” Banjo said. “He was thinking about it for months. Someone told me he had mentioned this as far back as November, at work, at the farmers market. So this wasn’t just a decision that was immediate. That’s what makes it complicated.” 

Former Santa Cruz City Council candidate Hector Marin told Lookout he had worked closely with Ritchie to host a community safety forum last April, in response to Santa Cruz police officers’ use of excessive force during the arrest of 29-year-old Teran Whitely. On Sunday, Marin said Ritchie’s advice about political action had been echoing in his head. 

“He told me that if you’re going to choose to do a political action, the location is very important, and it has to be somewhere very intentional, very purposeful,” Marin said. “We chose city hall, in front of that Black Lives Matter mural, for that event [in April] to highlight the hypocrisy of the city.” 

Marin said Ritchie had begun feeling like his activism wasn’t making enough of an impact. That struck Marin as odd, he said, since Ritchie’s work offered a wellspring of inspiration for many local organizers. 

Marin then recalled the last direct message he received from Ritchie on Instagram. In November, Ritchie sent him a video from user hawk.newsome, in which a person was bringing attention to what he claimed were a series of self-immolations by inmates at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison in 2024. The person in the video said the inmates reportedly set themselves on fire to bring attention to the prison’s poor living conditions. (Multiple news sources have since reported that the inmates burned themselves, but did not self-immolate.)

“Could you imagine s–t being so bad that brothers are literally lighting themselves on fire — they call it self-immolation — to draw attention to it?” the person in the video asked, before urging people to call U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia to help protest prison conditions and urge action.

Marin thought the message was an effort by Ritchie to get people to call congressmembers and advocate for change. Now, he sees it as a sign that self-immolation was on Ritchie’s mind. 

“I think he was studying self-immolation as a way of practice, a way of protest,” Marin said. “He was doing this to protest against the city. The self-immolation was on purpose.” 

As the crowd dwindled and people began relocating the flowers and candles from Center Street to a memorial along the wall of city hall, Banjo told Lookout the next step of action will be urging the city and the police department to release the letters he believes Ritchie left in his car, explaining his intention. Banjo declined to say on the record how he knew Ritchie left behind letters. He said silence from the city and police department has only left the community confused. 

“I’m calling on the police department to release whatever information they have, and if they’re not going to release it, they need to give us an exact reason,” Banjo said. “There could be a public benefit to having some understanding and to be able to make meaning of a sad situation. And him being alive should be a bigger reason to release them. He sacrificed his life to get his message out, so, yes, we need that information. We need to know what they have.” 

Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker declined Friday to comment on the incident. “In some situations, such as this one, there are legal restrictions placed on the City that prohibit the City from providing all of the information that the media seeks,” he wrote in an email. “Thus, I am limited in how I can respond to your questions.”

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