A 26-year-old suspect was charged with murder in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on Monday evening. A five-day manhunt resulted in his arrest 300 miles away in Pennsylvania.
Luigi Mangione of Towson, Maryland, was taken into custody by authorities at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on December 9 after an employee called police to report a suspicious-looking person, authorities said.
Mangione was charged by New York City prosecutors on Dec. 9 with one count of murder, three counts of criminal possession of a weapon and one count of possession of a forged instrument, according to online court records. Just hours earlier, he was also charged by police in Altoona with forgery and carrying a firearm without a permit.
He has been denied bail and has not yet entered a plea to the charges. His next scheduled court appearance is on December 23 at the Blair County Courthouse in Pennsylvania.
New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch told TODAY on Dec. 10 that Mangione’s name was not on their radar until the McDonald’s employee called to report the suspicious person.
What do we know about the suspect?
After taking Mangione into custody, police in Altoona said they found a fake New Jersey driver’s license with the same name the suspected gunman used at a New York City hostel, police said.
“He was wearing a blue medical mask,” Altoona Officer Tyler Frye said at a Dec. 9 news conference. “As soon as we pulled that down, or we asked him to pull it off, me, my partner and I recognized him. immediately.”
Police also found a firearm, believed to be made by a 3D printer, similar to the weapon used in the shooting of Thompson, who was shot from behind on a busy Manhattan street as he walked into a hotel for an investor conference. Police. Additionally, they found a silencer and mask “consistent” with the masks the shooter was wearing.
Authorities said they also discovered a three-page document referring to the healthcare sector. It was a handwritten note that read in part, “These parasites expected it,” senior law enforcement officials said as they described the note to NBC News.
What is the background of the suspect?
The Maryland native is an Ivy League graduate and comes from a prominent family.
He was the valedictorian of the class of 2016 at the private Gilman School for boys in Baltimore.
“This is deeply disturbing news on top of an already terrible situation,” Gilman’s director, Henry PA Smyth, said in a statement. “Our hearts go out to all those affected.”
Mangione went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 2020, the school confirmed to NBC News.
He also served as lead advisor for pre-collegiate studies at Stanford, the university confirmed.
Mangione was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at UPenn for four years, the organization confirmed. Alejandro Romero, who attended UPenn with the suspect, told NBC News that they often played the popular video game “Among Us” together, in which they played hitmen.
“I thought it was extremely ironic that we were in this game and there could actually be a real murderer among us,” he said.
Mangione’s family has deep roots in Maryland, where she owns two country clubs in the Baltimore area. His cousin, Nino Mangione, is a Republican state lawmaker, his office confirmed to NBC News.
According to his LinkedIn profile, the 26-year-old worked as a software engineer in California after graduating. The company said he has not worked there since last year.
Mangione’s last known address was in Honolulu, Hawaii, NYPD Chief Joseph Kenny said at a news conference. Clips of Mangione show him in a coworking space in Oahu.
He has no prior criminal history, Kenny told TODAY on Dec. 10.
How do authorities try to determine a motive?
Investigators are conducting a full parsing of Mangione’s social media posts.
He once reposted about the trolley problem, a philosophical debate about sacrificing one person for the greater good.
Mangione also posted on the book review site Goodreads. He posted a review of ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’ earlier this year. The text is better known as the ‘Unabomber Manifesto’ by Ted Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty in 1998 to killing three people and injuring almost twenty others with bombs over a period of seventeen years.
‘It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as a madman’s manifesto, to avoid confronting some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it is simply impossible to ignore how presciently many of his predictions about modern society came true,” Mangione wrote.
Mangione also cited an opinion he found online that read, in part, “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary for survival. You may not like his methods, but if you look at things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.
“These companies don’t care about you, or your children, or your grandchildren,” the report continued. “They have no qualms about burning the planet down for a few dollars, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?”
Mangione also posted an X-ray of someone’s back online. Investigators told NBC News they are looking into whether the photo is of Mangione and whether it has anything to do with the crime.
Conversations with those who knew Mangione revealed that he “obviously had a lot of back pain for a period of time,” NBC News correspondent Sam Brock TODAY reported on Dec. 10. Brock added that Mangione went “completely out of the picture” sometime between six months and a year ago and outreach efforts from family went unanswered.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
