Deadly incidents plague Capitol Hill amid U.S. crisis

Man sets himself on fire near where ‘depressed’ woman was slain in bizarre car chase

WASHINGTON— A man went up in flames in the middle of the National Mall on Friday before bystanders snuffed out the fire and he was rushed to a hospital, police and witnesses said.

Initial reports indicated the man set himself on fire, though it could not yet be confirmed, said police spokesman Hugh Carew.

Police responded to an emergency call about a fire shortly before 4:30 p.m. on the Mall lined by Washington’s famed Smithsonian museums, Carew said.

Nicole Didyk, an environmental engineer for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she was out for a run when she saw spotted a man with small flames on him. There was a red plastic gas cannister on the grass nearby.

“He was the only one in the middle of the mall,” she said. “There were five gentlemen hitting him with their T-shirts. When he fell over his arms were all white. He was burnt really bad.” The man thanked people who helped put the fire out, Didyk said.

She said the incident occurred on the grassy part of the Mall several blocks from the Capitol grounds, where a day earlier a car chase that began near the White House ended in a fatal shooting.

The Connecticut woman who was shot to death after trying to ram her car through a White House barrier had been deteriorating mentally for months and believed the president was communicating with her, a federal law enforcement official said Friday. Miriam Carey’s killing at the hands of police Thursday was Washington’s second major spasm of deadly violence involving an apparently unstable person in 2-and-ahalf weeks. Interviews with people who knew the 34-year-old woman suggested she was coming apart well before she loaded her 1-year-old daughter into the car for the drive to Washington. Carey had suffered a head injury in a fall and had been fired as a dental hygienist, according to her former employer. Her mother said she was suffering from postpartum depression. The federal official said investigators have been interviewing Carey’s family about her mental state and reviewing writings found in her Stamford condominium. “We are seeing serious degradation in her mental health, certainly within the last 10 months, since December, ups and downs,” the official said. The woman had made delusional “expressions about the president in the past” and believed President Barack Obama was communicating with her, the official said. “Those communications were, of course, in her head,” the official said. Carey’s neighbors in Stamford were shocked to learn the driver’s identity and see her gleaming black Infiniti wrecked outside the Capitol in TV footage. Erin Jackson, her next-door neighbor on the building’s ground floor, said Carey doted on her daughter, Erica, often taking the girl on picnics. “She was pleasant. She was very happy with her daughter, very proud of her daughter,” she said. But Carey’s mother, Idella Carey, told ABC that her daughter began suffering from postpartum depression after giving birth in August 2012. “She was depressed. . . . She was hospitalized,” said Idella Carey.