Financier Alexander Chatfield Burns died by suicide shortly before he was to be sentenced in a sealed criminal case tied to the 2014 collapse of his insurance empire, according to recently unsealed court documents and a coroner’s report released Monday.
Mr. Burns, 34 years old, was found dead on Oct. 26 at his residence in Charleston, S.C. After an investigation, the Charleston County Coroner’s Office determined that he killed himself by taking a lethal dose of a powder that can cause a blood-oxygen disorder and asphyxiation, according to the report released Monday.
Mr. Burns became “very depressed” after receiving news the prior day “regarding legal proceedings that he had been dealing with for a number of years,” the report said.
Although it wasn’t publicly known until after his death, Mr. Burns had pleaded guilty in 2018 to eight criminal counts in a sealed proceeding in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. He agreed to cooperate with the government.
Mr. Burns’s sentencing had been set for Dec. 17, according to a filing in the case that was unsealed in December following Mr. Burns’s death. Because a final judgment hadn’t been issued at the time of the defendant’s death, a federal judge dismissed the case on Dec. 16.
Mr. Burns was a whiz kid who a decade ago gained control of several insurers and a brokerage firm through a New York firm named Southport Lane Management LLC.
The empire collapsed after Mr. Burns in early 2014 checked himself into the mental-health ward of a hospital, leaving behind an affidavit describing an unusual series of asset transfers. Regulators seized control of two of the main insurers soon after. The collapse of Mr. Burns’s empire was the focus of a 2015 article in The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Burns told the Journal at the time of the article that, aside from his regular compensation, “at no time did I ever, nor will I ever, receive any personal financial benefit from any Southport transaction.”
In his criminal case, Mr. Burns pleaded guilty to four counts related to the Southport insurance collapse. In addition, he pleaded guilty to four counts related to his involvement in an international scheme to defraud foreign taxing authorities.
At the time of his death, Mr. Burns was a defendant in a wide-ranging civil case brought by the Danish customs and tax authority. The authority claimed it was defrauded into issuing tax refunds totaling more than $2 billion to more than 100 pension plans that didn’t deserve them, including a pension plan that Mr. Burns controlled.
According to the coroner’s report, Mr. Burns’s girlfriend found him unresponsive on a bathroom floor of his Charleston apartment and called 911. Authorities found two bottles containing a white powder labeled sodium nitrite nearby.
Ingesting sodium nitrite, best known as a food preservative used in cooked meats, has become a novel method of suicide in recent years, according to a recent report by Canadian pathologists.
Mr. Burns left a note addressed to his attorney, which the coroner’s office didn’t make public. Messages left with two attorneys for Mr. Burns weren’t returned.
Write to Mark Maremont at mark.maremont@wsj.com and Leslie Scism at leslie.scism@wsj.com
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