Luigi Mangione is accused of murdering the CEO of UnitedHealthcare

Photo illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: NYPD

This is an evolving story.

After a five-day manhunt that spanned several states, authorities arrested Luigi Mangione in connection with the targeted killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, in Manhattan last week.

Mangione has not been charged in Thompson’s murder, but at a news conference announcing the arrest, Mayor Eric Adams said “we have a strong person of interest” in the crime. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Mangione, 26, was taken into custody by local police at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, following a tip from an employee who said the suspicious man resembled photos of the suspected killer released by the New York Police Department. Police in Altoona have seized a “ghost gun,” a silencer and fake IDs they say tie Mangione to a brazen killing spree in New York.

A handwritten document described as a manifesto was also found in Mangione’s possession, which reportedly condemned the health care industry. CNN quoted several lines on the air after the arrest, including “those vermin had it” and “I don’t mean to hurt, but it had to be done.” When NYPD officers examined the crime scene outside the Hilton Hotel where Thompson was killed, they found shell casings scrawled with “delay” and “deny,” terms often used by insurance companies when they deny patient claims. It was the first hint that Thompson, 50, was deliberately killed — potentially in an act of revenge against UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer. Anger at the insurance industry divided the vast swathes of the public, who responded with sympathy for the killer, sometimes rejoicing at the heinous crime.

Mangione left a social media trail before the murder, where he wrote mostly innocuous messages about his twenty-year life, but there was at least one clue that pointed to a potential motive: a quote from Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unambomber, a terrorist who killed and maimed people who, as he believed, destroyed the world with the help of technology: “Our society tends to view any regime as a disease of thought or behavior that is inconvenient to the system, and this is believable, because when a person does not fit into the system, it causes pain to them, as well as problems to the system. Thus the manipulation of the individual to fit him into the system is seen as a cure for disease and therefore as a good.’

The largest manhunt in the city’s recent history began early last Wednesday morning outside the Hilton Hotel in Midtown, where Thompson was staying for a business conference. Once outside, the masked gunman opened fire at least twice, hitting and killing Thompson. Then, according to police records and surveillance video, the attacker crossed the street, got on his bicycle and zigzagged through Midtown, Central Park and finally the bus terminal in Upper Manhattan. Within hours, he effectively eluded the nation’s largest police department, with access to thousands of cameras, and disappeared.

Soon, the authorities compiled a partial chronology on the eve of the crime. ABC News the attacker reportedly arrived in the city on November 24 on an interstate bus departing from Atlanta, Georgia. He then checked into an Upper West Side hostel on Nov. 30 using a fake New Jersey ID, according to CNNand paid in cash. Photos of the unmasked gunman were obtained here after the gunman reportedly removed his mask while flirting with a hostel front desk worker. On December 4, the day of the shooting, a masked man was spotted at a Starbucks a few blocks from the Hilton. Around this time, the attacker threw away a water bottle and a protein bar, which police recovered and took DNA samples from.

Tisch credited the “greatest detectives in the world” with tracking down the killer and finding partial images of his face taken in a hostel where he took off his mask to flirt with a party girl and a taxi that captured the gunman’s eyes from the back seat. . The images were immediately released, and 300 miles to the west, a McDonald’s patron linked them to Mangione. NYPD detectives rushed to Altoona to interview Manighon, who was being held on gun charges.

Mangione grew up in the Baltimore area, where he attended an expensive private high school before attending the University of Pennsylvania for college. He later moved to Hawaii, where he spent part of the past year at a shared living and co-working space in Honolulu called Surfbreak HNL.

“Luigi was an incredibly thoughtful, compassionate person. I had many long and deep conversations with him not only about the state of world affairs, but also about what we can do to improve society,” says R. J. Martin, owner of Surfbreak HNL. “It’s like total disbelief that it could have been him in the sense that when you talk about just a good person, like someone you’d be lucky enough to spend time with someone who was just thoughtful and had a good heart. It was definitely Luigi.”