Burning Man Deaths

2017

Aaron Joel Mitchell died Sunday at age 41 after running into a burning structure at the festival. He was trapped under the falling structure, preventing the on-scene firefighters from removing him from the flames immediately.

2014

29-year-old Wyoming woman attending the Burning Man counterculture festival in Nevada died early Thursday after she was struck by a bus carrying passengers around the playa in the Black Rock Desert.

The Pershing County sheriff's office identified the victim on Thursday as Alicia Louise Cipicchio of Jackson. 

2007

Jermaine Barley, was found dead at Burning Man in 2007. SF Gate reported Barley hung himself in a tent during the festival, which he had attended for six years. Barley was a DJ who went by the name “Optic Orange,”

2006

New York DJ Adam Goldstone fainted in his RV at Burning Man in 2006 and was rushed to a Nevada hospital where he died, according to an obituary in The Villager. At age 37, Goldstone died of heart arrhythmia connected to a childhood condition.

2003

Katharine Lampman, 21, fell out of a moving “art car” in 2003 and was caught under the wheels and killed.

1996

In 1996, 11 years after Burning man was founded in 1986, a San Francisco artist riding a motorcycle collided into a van at the festival. Michael Furey, 37, had been drinking, the LA Times reported, and was killed in the accident.

Serious Accident

Larry Dean Hudson Jr., driving a borrowed blue 1996 Pontiac Grand Am, ran over a tent near the rave camp, early Monday morning, crashing the car which then splashed scalding radiator fluid on a third woman in a separate tent.. Of the three campers hospitalized, one, Daniel Reed, suffered permanent brain injuries.

Hudson was charged with driving while intoxicated and causing bodily injury, possession of a controlled substance and of paraphernalia (a hypodermic needle), and reckless driving.