When I was a kid I struck up a friendship with an older guy called John Ayres. John was a nut, but pretty harmless, and always made me laugh watching him riding his new Kawasaki KZ400 with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he had little burn marks all around his mouth. John had been in and out of the local mental institution (he'd suffered pretty bad child abuse from his father, from what I gathered) and lived with his mum, who had problems controlling him at times.
John gave me his Anschutz .22 rifle, that was missing the bolt assembly. He said he didn't know what had happened to the bolt, but I found out later his mum had one of the neighbours remove it when John wasn't home. John suffered terribly from depression, and one day he knocked on his neighbours door and asked if he could borrow their rifle, but they refused, so he walked around to the gas station, bought a gallon of 2 stroke fuel, walked over to the railway paddocks behind his house, sat down, and poured the fuel over himself and set himself on fire.
It was this time of year, (Summer in Oz) so the grass was pretty dry, and his self immolation caused a grass fire. We all used to ride our dirtbikes in those paddocks, so 2 friends of mine rode over to see what was going on. They found John on fire, so raced over to one of their parents places, and Chris' dad rang for an ambulance, then ran back to John. He made the mistake of putting a blanket over John, and when they got him to hospital and peeled the blanket off him, the skin peeled off with the blanket.
They gave him what pain killers they could, but not much was working due to all of the exposed nerve endings, all of his appendages (fingers, toes, penis etc were burned off, but he lived for several hours, screaming, until he passed. The two guys who found him both became heroin addicts in later years, and I can't help but think they were suffering from PTSD, so it was just a terrible thing, I bet his neighbour wished he'd loaned him his gun.
