A 22-year-old man died over the Fourth of July holiday weekend after attempting to launch fireworks off from atop his head, authorities said. His family says that he thought it was a dud.

Devon Staples was celebrating and drinking with family and friends at a backyard party in Calais, Maine Saturday evening when he placed a reloadable fireworks mortar tube on the top of his head Washington Post reports.

Mortar tubes usually consist of cardboard and are used to carry prepackaged charges. Authorities were unsure what kind of fireworks were in the shell, according to Reuters.

A spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, Stephen McCausland, told Associated Press that Staples claimed he would light it. “His friends thought they had dissuaded him from doing it,” McCausland said. But before they could really stop him, he “ignited the fireworks and he was killed instantly.”

Staples’ brother, Cody Staples, told the New York Daily News that he was only a few feet away when the fireworks were lit. Staples said that rushing Devon to the hospital was not necessary. “There was no Devon left when I got there,” Cody said.

He added that it was a “freak accident” since Cody was not the kind of person to act on something like this. He was the type of person to do something like this to make people laugh. Authorities called it a fatal head injury.

His mother, Kathleen, agreed. CBS News reports that she said Devon he was a happy person and this was not suicide. “He believed it was a dud, he stuck it over his head and he was goofing off,” she said.

This was the first death related to fireworks since Maine legalized fireworks three years prior to the incident.

Staples’ friend, Kayleb Moses, said that he had left the party with his girlfriend before the incident. He described Staples to be happy and “Definitely the life of the party, that’s for sure.”

Calais Fire Chief Robert Posick said that this should serve as a cautionary tale to others, WABI reports. “It’s not just a benign piece of fun. It’s truly dangerous and it does go boom unfortunately,” Posick said.