NEW YORK – They saw him smiling on a hostel security camera, but don’t know his name. They found the backpack he threw away during his flight, but don’t know where he went.
As the search for the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson continues, investigators are faced with a tantalizing dichotomy: They have a wealth of evidence, but the shooter remains a mystery.
Police don’t know who he is, where he is, or why he did it, although they are confident it was a targeted attack rather than a random act.
“The net is tightening,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said Saturday.
Hours after he spoke, police divers were seen searching a pond in Central Park where the killer fled after the shooting. Officers searched the park for days looking for possible clues and found his bag there on Friday.
Late Saturday, police released two additional photos of the suspected shooter, which appeared to be from a camera mounted in a taxi. The first shows him outside the vehicle and the second shows him looking through the partition between the rear seat and the front of the cabin. In both cases, his face is partially hidden by a blue medical-style mask.
Police are tracking the gunman’s steps using surveillance video, and it appears he left the city by bus shortly after the shooting Wednesday morning outside the New York Hilton Midtown. He was seen on video about 45 minutes later at a bus station in the city, said Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives for the NYPD.
As the high-profile search expands across state lines, the FBI announced late Friday that it was offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, in addition to the up to $10,000 reward offered by the NYPD. The police assume that the suspect acted alone.
Police provided no updates on the hunt Saturday, but investigators urged patience — even if a killer is on the loose.
Hundreds of investigators are sifting through video recordings and social media, investigating tips from the public and interviewing people who may have information, including Thompson’s family and co-workers and the gunman’s randomly assigned roommates at the Manhattan hostel where he was staying.
“This isn’t ‘Blue Bloods.’ We’re not going to solve this in 60 minutes,” Kenny told reporters on Friday. “We are meticulously searching every piece of evidence we can come across.”
The gunman paid cash at the hostel, presented what police said was a fake ID and allegedly paid cash for taxi rides and other transactions. He did not speak to others in the hostel and almost always kept his face covered with a mask, lowering it only when eating.
But investigators caught pause when they came across security camera footage of an unguarded moment in which he briefly showed his face shortly after arriving in New York on Nov. 24.
Police have distributed the footage to news outlets and on social media, but have so far been unable to identify him using facial recognition — possibly because of the angle of the footage or restrictions on how the NYPD can use that technology, Kenny said .
On Friday evening, investigators found a backpack worn by the gunman in Central Park, police said. They didn’t immediately reveal what was inside, but said it would be tested and analyzed.
Another possible clue, a fingerprint on an item he bought at Starbucks minutes before the shooting, has so far proven useless in identifying him, Kenny said.
With the help of surveillance cameras on almost every building and block, police were able to track the gunman’s movements.
They know he ambushed Thompson at 6:44 a.m. when the executive arrived at the Hilton for his company’s annual investor conference, using a 9mm pistol that resembled the weapons farmers use to put down animals without cause a loud noise. They know that the ammunition found near Thompson’s body bore the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose,” mimicking a phrase used by critics of the insurance industry.
Kenny said the fact that the shooter knew the UnitedHealthcare group was holding a conference at the hotel and what route Thompson would take to get there indicated he could possibly be a disgruntled employee or customer.
Investigators know from surveillance footage that the gunman fled to Central Park on a bicycle and dumped it near 85th Street around 7 a.m.
He then walked a few blocks and hopped into a taxi, which arrived at 7:30 a.m. at the George Washington Bridge bus station, which is near the northern tip of Manhattan and offers shuttles to New Jersey and Greyhound routes to Philadelphia, Boston and Washington. .
Investigators don’t know what happened next. They are looking for more surveillance video, but have yet to find any video of the shooter boarding a bus or leaving the station.
“We have reason to believe that the individual in question has left New York City,” Police Chief Jessica Tisch told CNN on Friday.
Police determined from video footage that the gunman had been in the city for 10 days before the shooting. He arrived at Manhattan’s main bus terminal on a Greyhound bus that originated in Atlanta, although it is not clear whether he boarded there or at one of about six stops along the route.
Immediately afterwards, he took a taxi to the Hilton area and stayed there for about half an hour, Kenny said.
The night he arrived, around 11 p.m., he took a taxi to the HI New York City Hostel. It was there, while speaking to an employee in the lobby, that he briefly pulled down the mask and smiled, giving investigators a brief look they now rely on to identify and arrest a killer.
