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History's most famous cults are known primarily for their final suicidal acts: the mass poisoning at Jonestown, the self-immolation of the Branch Davidians, the self-asphyxiations of Heaven's Gate.

Roberts was an erratic maniac, no doubt, but much of what he learned about the dark arts of self-immolation came from his father, Walter, a screenwriter during the glory days of radio drama who then started his own theater in Atlanta, where Roberts was raised.

There have been arrests and a shocking self-immolation.

In its coverage of Bushnell’s death, New York Magazine noted that “since the Vietnam War, self-immolation has been a dramatic but rare act of protest” while The Daily Beast has called Azzarello’s death “part of a startling trend” of such deaths in the United States.

A longitudinal study published in the medical journal Burns showed that global rates of self-immolation had tripled in the five years following the self-burning of Bouazizi and that this was a “stable trend.”