A man was found dead at the Burning Man festival on Thursday, spelling trouble for the already embattled gathering. The infamous event was just about halfway over when authorities were called in over an unresponsive man. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Police are a rare sight in Black Rock City, Nevada, but they were there on Thursday evening. Halfway through this year’s Burning Man festival, 33-year-old Shane Billingham was found unresponsive in his own car, according to a report by The BBC. Bystanders performed CPR on Billingham until medics arrived, who took him to the event’s medical tent and then to a nearby hospital.
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Billingham was ultimately pronounced dead, and local police say they are treating his passing as “suspicious. A post-mortem examination reportedly revealed “poisonous” levels of carbon monoxide in Billingham’s blood.
The Washoe County medical examiner’s office issued a statement saying that Billingham had “a concentration of carbon monoxide in his blood which would be considered poisonous to human life.”
“Preliminary toxicology showed the presence of controlled substances to be an exacerbating factor,” they added.
Billingham was staying at the Beats Boutique in Burning Man. His camp set up a temporary memorial for him, which will remain for the rest of the festival. One of his friends, Steve MacWithey, told the Reno Gazette Journal that Billingham was “one of the best people” he had ever known.
Billinham was a New Zealand national, and it is unclear whether he had traveled to the U.S. just for the festival or for other reasons as well. On Facebook, his current residence is still listed as Aotea, New Zealand. His family has launched a crowdfunding campaign in the hopes of bringing his remains home to be laid to rest.
Burning Man is a massive music and arts festival that is held every summer in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, at a site about 100 miles away from Reno. It attracts tens of thousands of people, and celebrates self-reliance, self-expression and egalitarianism.
Each year, attendees build a sprawling temporary city filled with art installments, performances and ritual. The whole thing goes on for a week, and then the festival-goers carry everything out with them, leaving not a trace of their presence. The festival is also often associated with drug use and promiscuity, and this year it faced more issues than ever, even before Billingham’s passing.
This year, Burning Man organizers needed to renew their permit with the Bureau of Land Management before the event took place. The federal agency tried to impose new measures on the festival that they feared “would spell the end of the event as we know it.”
“The proposed level of government surveillance of and involvement in our everyday operations is unprecedented and unwarranted, and is unsupported by the… analysis,” read the post on BurningMan.org.
The organizers were able to work with the government to keep Burning Man alive, but with new attention turned on them in the wake of Billingham’s passing, the event could be in trouble all over again.
