Photo: Luigi Mangione/Instagram
This is a developing story.
A portrait of the man accused of gunning down a health-insurance executive in Manhattan, drawing sympathy from the public, started to take shape in the hours after authorities say they arrested Luigi Mangione in connection with last week’s targeted killing.
Mangione, 26, is being held on weapons charges in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he was apprehended by police following a tip that a suspicious man matched the identity of the gunman who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to death. He has not been charged with Thompson’s murder, but at a press conference announcing the arrest, Mayor Eric Adams said that “we have a strong person of interest” in the crime following a five-day manhunt.
A handwritten document described as a manifesto was recovered alongside a “ghost gun,” silencer, and fake IDs that officials say ties him to the murder. “I don’t want to cause any trauma, but it had to be done,” the document stated, according to CNN. When police investigated the scene of Thompson’s murder, they found “delay” and “deny” scrawled on shell casings — terms often used by insurance companies when they deny patients’ claims. It was an early clue that Thompson, 50, was purposely killed in a potential act of vengeance against the nation’s largest insurer. The anger at the insurance industry was shared by a huge swath of the public, which reacted with sympathy for the killer, sometimes slipping into glee for the heinous crime.
Mangione hails from a prominent Maryland-area family with ties to real estate and state politics. The Baltimore Banner reports that his family owns two Maryland recreational properties and a group of nursing and assisted-living facilities in the state they founded, and where Mangione’s LinkedIn profile said he previously worked as a volunteer. Nino Mangione, a Republican Maryland delegate, told local NBC affiliate WBAL that he is Luigi’s cousin. Mangione attended the Gilman School, a private all-boys high school in Baltimore where tuition exceeds $30,000 per year.
Mangione at the Gilman School in 2016.
Photo: Luigi Mangione/Facebook
In 2020, Mangione graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in engineering and computer science and, according to his LinkedIn profile, minored in mathematics with a concentration in artificial intelligence. According to a 2018 article in Penn Today, a university publication, he founded a club for video-game programmers as an undergraduate. “In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” Mangione, then a junior, told the publication. According to his LinkedIn profile, Magione had spent the past four years working as a data engineer for an online car retailer that is entirely remote.
He appears to have spent part of that period in Hawaii, where he posted on Instagram like a 20-something digital nomad, living at a co-working space called Surfbreak HNL in Honolulu. “Luigi was an incredibly thoughtful, compassionate human being. I had many long, deep conversations with him about not just the state of world affairs but things that we could do to improve society,” said R.J. Martin, the owner of Surfbreak HNL. “It’s like utter disbelief that it could have possibly been him, in the sense that when you talk about just a good human, like somebody that you’d be lucky to spend time with, somebody that was just thoughtful and had a good heart, that was definitely Luigi.”
Mangione in Hawaii.
Photo: Luigi Mangione/Instagram
On X, Mangione followed a variety of accounts befitting a typically online young man — self-help gurus like Andrew Huberman, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and “heterodox” thinkers such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, as well as Joe Rogan. His strongest interest by far is in the work of Tim Urban, a writer and illustrator popular with tech types who publishes science explainers and anti-woke political writing about how polarization is bad and rationalism can save the world.
There was one prominent exception to his innocuous online trail, though. Early this year he favorably reviewed the book-length manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, a fellow math whiz better known as the Unabomber, who killed and maimed people he believed had ruined the world with technology. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” Mangione then quoted a “take I found online that I think is interesting,” which ended by saying “‘violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
The manifesto found on Mangione is said to have stated the “parasites that had it coming.”
The massive manhunt began at the entrance of the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan last Wednesday morning where Thompson was staying to attend a nearby business conference. At approximately 6:44 a.m. near the hotel’s doors, a hooded figure in a mask approached Thompson from behind and opened fire. After tapping the back of the weapon to apparently clear a jam, the gunman pursued his prey for several steps, firing at least once more. With Thompson fatally wounded, the gunman then crossed the street and took off on a zigzag course on a bicycle into Midtown and Central Park, before the trail went cold at a bus terminal in upper Manhattan. Within a few hours, he had eluded the nation’s largest police department, with access to thousands of cameras, and disappeared.
Officers investigate the scene of Thompson’s murder last Wednesday.
Photo: Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images
Police officers and detectives scoured the getaway route for footage taken by cameras, working backward to create a partial timeline of the lead-up to the crime. They discovered the gunman had arrived in the city ten days earlier from an interstate bus that originated in Atlanta, Georgia. He then checked into an Upper West Side hostel on November 30, using a fake New Jersey ID that officials say was later found on Mangione. It was there that he briefly let his guard down, pulling his mask down to reportedly flirt with a person working the desk. On December 4, the day of the shooting, the masked man was spotted at a Starbucks a few blocks away from the Hilton. He discarded a water bottle and a protein bar, from which police obtained a smudged fingerprint and DNA.
After leaving Central Park, the gunman hailed a taxi and headed to the bus terminal, but not before a camera looking into the backseat captured a clear image of his eyes. The NYPD immediately released the photos in hopes of identifying the suspect, and, 300 miles away in a McDonald’s, a patron recognized a man inside as the same one in the photos. Jessica Tisch, the new police commissioner, credited “the greatest detectives in the world” for gathering the clues that led to Mangione’s arrest.
“Our hope is that today’s apprehension brings some relief to Brian’s family, friends, colleagues, and the many others affected by this unspeakable tragedy,” UnitedHealth said in a statement. “We thank law enforcement and will continue to work with them on this investigation.”
With additional reporting by John Herrman and Andrew Rice
