A local TV journalist set his arm ablaze for Gaza. He has no regrets.

On a Sunday afternoon in early October, Sam Mena walked through a crowded protest in Washington, D.C. Tall and in his 20s, the Arizona native blended in. He’d come to protest Israel’s war in Gaza, and like many in the crowd, he wore a kaffiyeh around his neck. Underneath it, dangling from a lanyard, hung a press pass from an Arizona TV station.

Nervously, Mena chatted with the protesters and journalists gathered in the Black Lives Matter Plaza, located just two blocks from the White House. While holding a tripod in one hand, he used his other hand to text a friend with an urgent plea. “Please watch,” he wrote. “I need at least one set of eyes on this.” Then, placing his phone on the tripod, he hit record on Instagram Live and waited for the three-second countdown to the moment that would change his life.

“Hello,” the 29-year-old began, before introducing himself. Then he launched into a 30-minute speech about the carnage in Gaza and the complicity of the media and the U.S. government. America was subsidizing a genocide, Mena told the small audience watching. And news organizations were not telling the truth about it. Nearly a year into the conflict, he said, he could no longer remain silent.

He closed his speech with a promise. “To the 10,000 children in Gaza that have lost a limb in this conflict, I give my left arm to you,” Mena said. “I pray my voice was able to raise up yours and that your smiles never disappear.”

And with that, he briefly exited the frame and doused his left arm in gasoline he’d kept in a water bottle. He stepped back in front of the camera, slid his thumb across the spark wheel of a lighter and lit his arm on fire.

“Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” he screamed as his arm burst into flames.

What followed was chaos. Several police officers rushed over, pulling off Mena’s burning kaffiyeh and dousing him with water from plastic bottles. Other protesters used their own kaffiyehs to put out Mena’s flaming arm. “Free Palestine!” Mena continued to scream, though the pain soon became so unbearable that he stopped forming words. Soon after the flames began, they had been put out, leaving his arm smoldering.

“We spread the misinformation!” Mena yelled as a fellow protestor hugged him, his graying arm hovering gingerly over her shoulder. His shirt sleeve had mostly burned away.

Pictures of Mena’s fiery protest immediately went viral. His employer, Arizona’s Family, fired him. For months, that’s where the story ended, pushed out of the news cycle in the heat of a presidential election. If anyone wondered why Mena did what he did — if they pondered what might have driven an educated, well-spoken and seemingly normal person to self-immolate in the nation’s capital — nobody bothered to ask him.

But two months after he set himself ablaze, Mena was eager to explain himself. In a 70-minute interview with Phoenix New Times, the now-former TV videographer recounted what drove him to such a drastic act of protest. It was “very, very painful,” he says, requiring sacrifices “which I’m having to kind of confront right now.” Wearing a protective sleeve on his left arm, which suffered second- and third-degree burns, Mena opened up about what his act cost him: his job, cherished relationships and, yes, his arm.

Would he do it again? No, he has no death wish. But does it regret doing it in the first place?

Not one bit.

'Don't need an arm to be happy'

When Mena decided to set himself on fire, he didn’t do it lightly.

He knew he’d lose his job; as a journalist, he couldn’t also be an activist. But he felt so strongly about the situation that he was willing to sacrifice his career, not to mention his arm. He felt sure that extreme measures were necessary to bring attention to the children of Gaza.

By choosing self-immolation, Mena was opting for what is considered the most extreme form of protest. The act of lighting one’s body on fire for a cause — and often giving one’s life in an excruciatingly painful way — originates with Buddhist teachings. According to Jon Coburn, a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln in London who researches self-immolation, those who commit it tend to view the act less as suicide and more as a sign of utmost devotion to a community, religion or cause. Utmost it certainly is. Approximately 80% of hospitalized self-immolation patients die, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The first modern public self-immolation occurred in 1963, when Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire to protest against the oppression of the South Vietnamese government. Vietnamese culture has a greater understanding of self-immolation, Coburn says, but early on, Americans “just could not conceive suicide as protest” in their communities. Then a series of self-immolations occurred across the United States in reaction to the Vietnam War. About 60 people have self-immolated in the U.S. since the mid-1960s, Coburn says.

In the U.S., self-immolating protests were either ignored or brushed off as crazed acts by news organizations that portrayed them as mental health episodes. Some people have self-immolated as a form of suicide rather than protest, but Coburn says “each act has its own motivations and resonance and reasons."

Rowan Imran, a pro-Palestinian activist and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Arizona, recalled many people calling 25-year-old Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell “insane” after he self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. in February. But Imran has worked with enough patients to know not to throw that label around idly, even when someone sets themselves alight.

“We don’t just see the symptoms that a patient displays and slap a diagnosis,” she says. “There has to be several things that a patient has to meet before you can even consider a mental health diagnosis. … That was very typical of the media to say, ‘Oh, he was disturbed, that’s why that happened.’”

Mena was familiar with Bushnell, who set his whole body on fire and died from his burns. “It's such as medieval form of protest, and to think that we would still engage in that kind of protest in 2024 was powerful,” Mena says. He wanted to make a similar statement but had no intention of suffering such a permanent fate. He would give his left arm — Mena is right-handed — but not his life.

“I will continue to live my life happy, even if I lose an arm,” Mena says. “Don't need an arm to be happy. You don't need a leg to be happy and find satisfaction in your life. And I wanted to try to communicate that to the kids in Gaza who have inspired me to live a happier life.”

As the idea congealed in his mind, Mena continued about his life. Two months before his fiery protest, he traveled on assignment for Arizona’s Family to Arizona’s southern border to cover a Donald Trump campaign visit. Standing behind the former and future president, with headphones on and camera in hand, his thoughts remained on Gaza. “In the back of my mind,” Mena says, “I was already aware I was going to go protest.”

Nobody else was, though. Mena kept his plans to himself. When he left for Washington two months later, Mena told family and friends he was taking a peaceful drive up the California coast with a friend. The night before his protest, he sat on the bed of his Airbnb in D.C., grappling with a nauseating mix of emotions. By design, he’d left himself no one to talk to.

He was committed but scared. He didn’t intend to take his life, but he’d been on plenty of crime scenes as a journalist to understand that things can go awry quickly. Just in case, he’d recorded video messages for his family members, created a will and returned a truck he was borrowing from an uncle. He thought about what Bushnell must have gone through.

​​"I'm not getting cold feet,” he says, recounting his thoughts at the time. “But this is really, really real.”

The protest and the aftermath

As he walked through the protest in Black Lives Matter Plaza the next day, Mena set his protest in motion.

In a post on X, Mena announced he’d be live-streaming on Instagram “from the White House exterior” in an hour. Within minutes of that post, Amber Warnock-Estrada responded with curiosity. Mena had met the Grand Canyon University senior through his brother, Dan. “I had no idea, that’s awesome!” Warnock-Estrada replied on X. “You with an org or is this all independent?”

Soon, as Warnock-Estrada finished lunch in the living room of her mom’s Glendale home, a text message popped up on her phone. It was from Mena, asking her to watch. It gave no hint of what would follow, but she made sure to tune in.

Around 4:30 p.m. EST, Mena began his livestream. A half-hour after starting his 4,000-word address, which he also posted to his website, he raised a flame-covered arm to the sky, screaming “Free Palestine!” Then, he was just screaming. “It became so distracting that you lose a sense of language,” Mena says. After police and bystanders put out the flames, Mena and the cops waited 20 minutes for an ambulance, which took him to a hospital. Mena assured everyone that he wasn’t trying to die.

"I have things in my life that I want to continue to do,” Mena says. “I'm very happy in my life and comfortable in who I am.”

At the hospital, he assumed the arm was a goner. It looked like “a zombie had its way with it” and “fucking hurt,” Mena says. "I'm just looking at this thing, like, ‘Gosh, feed it to the dogs.’” Instead, Mena began an intensive rehabilitation program that involved washing his arm, treating the wounds and a variety of physical therapy exercises. At one point, as Mena’s arm swelled to gargantuan proportions, doctors performed an escharotomy, making a long incision down his arm to relieve the pressure.

He remained in the hospital for a month, the first two weeks of which he spent on suicide watch. Teams of psychiatric and therapy staffers made constant visits. Eventually, they determined he was no longer a risk to himself. “Very quickly, it became evident that my case was unique. That it was a form of protest,” Mena says. There “wasn’t any reason for them to be worried.”

Reassuring his doctors was far easier than reassuring his family members, whom he’d kept in the dark. Mena admitted that his actions were “kind of crazy” and says his family didn’t fully understand them. Eventually, according to Warnock-Estrada, Mena’s family rallied to support him, visiting him in the hospital two weeks after he was admitted.

It was hard on them, Mena says. (Mena declined to connect New Times to members of his family for this story, saying they were uninterested in speaking.) His siblings told him his protest had given them nightmares. "The situation kind of brought up really bad memories for my mom,” Mena says, “because she had a sister with mental health issues and this really kind of rattled that situation back up."

Other relationships have been harder to repair. Mena has been in contact with some former colleagues at Arizona’s Family, while others have not spoken to him because “I’ve protested our employer.” One friend of Mena’s still hasn’t spoken to him and is “still kind of working through it,” Mena says. Warnock-Estrada, who witnessed the entire livestream, was initially in a state of shock. But she’s “not mad at Sam,” she says, and is writing an article on Mena’s protest from her perspective.

Mena says he’s happy to unpack his decision to self-immolate for anyone who wants to ask. That includes the U.S. Secret Service. When Mena first checked into the hospital, police informed him that Secret Service agents would seek him out to talk about what he did. A month later, Mena checked out and boarded an airplane back home.

The Secret Service never did stop by.

Did it make a difference?

Mena’s recovery was long and painful. Ultimately, his family sped it along.

Mena’s sister was scheduled to get married in early November, and he was eager to be discharged in time to attend the ceremony. He checked out just in time to make it, but his haste meant he was unable to get his medications in time. To get back home, Mena went 18 hours — including a five-hour layover — without pain medications.

When he got back, he crashed on his bed in his Phoenix apartment, only for his cat, Chonk, to jump on his arm. “I yelped,” Mena says. The next day, Mena called his family to make a much-needed trip to ValleyWise Health to get those meds.

Mena is now confronting the reality of the next stage of his life.

Shortly after the news of his demonstration broke, Mena was publicly fired by Arizona’s Family. “Mena worked as a news photographer for KTVK/KPHO but was off duty and not in Washington on station business. Arizona’s Family expects its newsroom employees to conduct themselves with neutrality and objectivity,” the station wrote on its website. “Mena is no longer an employee.”

Mena figured his firing would happen. Before leaving for his trip to D.C., he’d put copies of his work for the station on an external hard drive. He also returned a book he’d borrowed from a coworker. Mena says the company’s insurance policy covered his care through the rest of October, although he had to change insurance plans after that.

When reached by New Times, Arizona's Family Executive News Director Sybil Hoffman said, "Arizona’s Family does not comment on personnel matters."

Now, Mena attends two-hour-long physical therapy sessions three times a week, hoping to regain full mobility in his left arm. Spotted purple and red wounds, which Mena calls “dragon scales,” span from his fingertips to below his shoulder. To the touch, the arm feels like a “rubber shoe,” Mena says. Most of the time, it’s covered in hospital-grade tan dressings.

In addition to rigorous physical therapy, Mena continues to work on his documentary. He’s eager to resume his career as a videographer and has applied for non-journalism jobs in video production. He’s seen openings at other news stations, but “I don’t think they would take me on if I applied,” Mena jokes.

Whatever comes next, Mena feels confident his message got across.

At least among pro-Palestine activists in Arizona — whom Mena does not profess to know well — that's the case. Imran thinks Mena’s protest “was a very honorable thing to do.” She says, “It’s a very sad thing when you see someone do such a strong form of protest,” but she calls it an “act of selflessness” that “shows how strong the media’s role has been playing in everything that’s been happening.”

Mohye Abdulaziz, the founder of the Arizona Palestine Solidarity Alliance, agrees. “I hope that he’s doing well. I hope that he’s recovering and he’s continuing to be a journalist and support his family,” Abdulaziz says. “Tell him this guy gives you much love.”

Of course, pro-Palestine activists such as Imran and Abdulaziz hardly need to be reminded of the war in Gaza. Whether Mena was able to reach people who haven’t been paying attention — much less those who disagree with him — is much less clear.

While dramatic and attention-grabbing, the purpose of self-immolation protests doesn’t always translate to the average person, Coburn says. “It does draw attention to certain issues because people kind of clamor for explanations of why somebody might have done this,” he adds. But sometimes the act itself consumes all the oxygen. “We've had a lengthy conversation here about the act of self-immolation,” Coburn notes during an interview, “more so than we have about Palestine, Israel and the story of that conflict."

Warnock-Estrada says she was one of just a handful of people to make it to the end of Mena’s livestream. But Mena’s protest certainly generated headlines afterward, and a social media post in December announcing another livestream to explain his protest was viewed more than 3 million times — “not an insignificant number,” Mena notes. Many of the responses to that post, though, were very negative.

That doesn’t faze Mena.

“A lot of people on Twitter disagree with what I did or whatever. I could care less,” he says. “Point is, I had a conversation going. Through my action, I'm contributing to this conversation, and I want to continue to contribute to this conversation.”

Whatever form that contribution takes, it will no longer involve gasoline and a lighter, Mena says. Nor does he think anybody else should be willing to scorch a limb for a cause. He just wants to prod people to do something.

“You can still do things in your life,” Mena says. “You don't have to go out and light your arm on fire like I did.”