A Manhattan judge has upheld a jury’s verdict of $60 million in pain and suffering damages awarded to a former 10th-grade student who was “literally … burned alive” inside a massive fireball that leapt from a chemistry teacher’s nitrate-demonstration gone wrong.

Pulling repeatedly from vivid testimony given during plaintiff Alonzo Yanes’ 2019 damages trial, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Alexander Tisch describes how the then-student was sitting just two or three feet from his chemistry teacher in 2014 when she tried “to show the students how various nitrates, when lit, caused flames to appear in different colors.”