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A man who said he was an Air Force veteran angry at the Department of Veterans Affairs was burned by the fire in front of the State Capitol in Atlanta on Tuesday morning.
Capt. Mark Perry of the Georgia State Patrol stated that the man had parked a passenger vehicle around 10:45 am and started walking towards the Capitol.
"He was tied up with homemade incendiary devices, firecrackers and was coated with some kind of flammable liquid and tried to ignite it," Captain Perry told reporters.
A patrol soldier from Georgia rushed to the man with a fire extinguisher "and was able to extinguish it fairly quickly," he said. In a telephone interview, Captain Perry said that the soldier was not on duty at that time – he was driving and jumped out of his patrol car when he saw the flames.
The injured man has not been identified. Officials said he was a 58-year-old man from Mableton, Ga., And was taken in critical condition at Grady Memorial Hospital with burns on 85 to 90 percent of his body.
Captain Perry said that the man was able to speak after the fire went out.
"He said that he was unhappy with the V.A. system and was looking for attention for that," he said.
The authorities closed the area around the Capitol and called the bomb team to make sure that the human vehicle did not contain any explosives. Neighboring buildings have been evacuated. No other injuries have been reported.
The incident occurred at a press conference about a new state law on hands-free driving. A series of noisy shots and then sirens could be heard in video of the event.
Natalie Dale, a spokeswoman for the state's Department of Transportation who spoke at the time, said that she initially assumed that the sounds were fireworks. But while they continued, Georgia's state patrol officers behind her began to take off.
"They were really calm, so I was very calm," she said. "I was with trained professionals."
Veterans Affairs Canada is a sprawling organization with more than 1,700 clinics and hospitals and has been in the grip of a scandal.
In March 2016, a 51-year-old veteran died after being set on fire outside a Veterans Affairs clinic in northern New Jersey. An investigation revealed that clinic staff had failed to ensure repeatedly that he had received adequate mental health care.
Critics of the agency have long expressed frustrations. Michael Owens, a veteran of the Mableton Marine Corps and head of state with the Truman National Security Project, said that many veterans say it's not meeting their needs.
"Being an unhappy veteran is something I hear a lot in our veteran community here in Atlanta," he said.
Mr. Owens added that the agency needed to do a better job in signaling the indicators that a veteran might have problems with. "We have to do better," he said.
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