A man left severely scarred when set afire as a boy by his dad at a Buena Park motel more than three decades ago, who went on to befriend Michael Jackson and become a respected, optimistic Las Vegas artist, has died at the age of 42.

An accomplished contemporary conceptual artist, Dave Dave – David Rothenberg until casting aside the last name of his father – was left with life-long scars from his father’s attempt on his life in 1983.

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But friends say despite the betrayal and violence in his childhood that drew national headlines, Dave was a peaceful, empathetic and loyal man who drew confidants from all walks of life.

“To have gone through what he had gone through as a child at the hands of his father, and to lead a life as rich as he did and as creative and as caring and as giving as he did, I think is amazing,” said Mike Watkiss, a longtime friend of Dave’s family who spoke on behalf of his mother, Marie.

In interviews over the years, Dave described himself as a survivor – not a victim.

“There is a lot that happens in people’s lives, but that doesn’t define them as a human being, it makes them stronger,” Dave told a Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter in 2016.

A representative with the Clark County Coroner’s Office on Wednesday confirmed that Dave died on July 15 at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas. The coroner representative said the cause of his death could take up to six to eight weeks to determine.

In 1983, Dave’s father, Charles Rothenberg, took the then-6-year-old on a trip to Southern California from New York, where the boy was living with his mother. The couple was locked in a bitter custody dispute, and Rothenberg had taken his son on vacation with the promise of visiting Orange County theme parks.

After a phone argument with his estranged wife, the father gave his son a sleeping pill, set him aflame and then walked out of the room – leaving other motel guests to drag the boy from the inferno. Rothenberg told authorities that he believed he was going to lose custody of his son.

Dave suffered third-degree burns over 90 percent of his body. The burns and repeated skin grafts left him with life-long scars on his hands, face and legs.

“My father poured kerosene all over my body, left me for dead and lit a match,” Dave told the Review-Journal in the 2016 interview. “I wish there was a better way to tell that story, but it was reality.

“However, that hasn’t changed me as a person,” Dave said. “It has embellished my character and allowed me to grow in ways unexplainable to anybody.”

Many were stunned when Rothenberg was sentenced to only 13 years in prison, the maximum allowed at the time. He served less than seven years before being paroled. The relatively light sentence helped pave the way for stricter sentencing guidelines.

The national attention the case brought led many to offer their support to David Rothenberg. Watkiss, a Phoenix-based television reporter who befriended him and his mother, Marie, said Dave had a way of putting people at ease, helping him befriend a “galaxy of friends from all walks of life.”

“He put people at peace, he brought people together,” Watkiss said. “A guy who had no reason to trust anyone other than his mother was amazingly trusting.”

Among those who reached out to Dave was Michael Jackson, who when the boy was 7 invited him to his Neverland Ranch, starting a life-long friendship.

In an interview with Larry King shortly after Jackson’s 2009 death, Dave described the singer as “almost like a father that I never had.”

“He opened up his arms to me and accepted me as a very good friend of his, and through the years he never let me go,” Dave told King of his friendship with Jackson.

At the time of his father’s release from prison on parole in 1990, the then-13-year-old boy told reporters that he wouldn’t feel safe until the day his father died. He said he could never forgive his father, and told reporters that he never wanted to see his father again.

A year later, the boy was drawn to art. No one guided him to it, he later told interviewers, it just seemed to come naturally.

“Something happens in my brain that makes me want to get up and put a paintbrush in my hand and go at it with a canvass,” Dave told the Review-Journal. “It is like a messenger within me guiding me to paint.”

In 1996, Dave, then 19, met with his father for the first time since he was set on fire. Wanting to close a chapter in his life, the son, according to news reports, read a statement to his father in which he told him he was not a father but an imposter, and that he wished his father could “experience the trauma and pain I have gone through.”

The elder Rothenberg continued to run afoul of the law, ultimately being sentenced in 2007 to two decades in prison following multiple felony convictions in three states for robbery, forgery and weapon charges.

According to his own artist statement, Dave focused his work on “creating conceptual works that represents hope in an urban environment, where oftentimes the struggles of life can be surpassed by the experience of living.”

By legally changing his name to Dave Dave, he explained, he wanted to “liberate myself from the confines of my father’s criminality.”

“To free myself of his name and his legacy, I decided to become my own person through changing my own name,” Dave told Larry King.

Dave’s Twitter feed often reflected his “belief in the concept of positivity in order to promote world peace.”

In recent months, his tweets included: “Always remember who you are”; “I am happy that tomorrow is a new day”; “You can’t sweep my up”; and “Be who you are. That’s all you can possibly be.”

In one tweet, Dave noted that he had turned down a suggestion by someone he knew to turn his life into a movie. There had already been a 1988 TV movie, “David,” starring Bernadette Peters as his mom and Matthew Lawrence as him.

“Dave was not about to be pigeonholed by one event in his life,” Watkiss said. “That was not the guy I knew. He grabbed hold of life with a sense of urgency and passion.”

Staff writer Tony Saavedra contributed to this report.