The top line Hours after his arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a manhunt that lasted days, Luigi Mangione, 26, who was named by officials as a “strong person of interest” in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, was officially charged with murder in New York late Monday.
According to court documents, Mangione was charged in Manhattan state court on Monday with murder, three crimes connected to the possession of firearms, and one charge of forgery.
According to several reports, Mangione was initially charged in Pennsylvania with forgery, carrying firearms without a license, tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of a crime, and giving false identification to law enforcement. During a court appearance in Pennsylvania, he was ordered to be held without bail.
Mangione will be extradited to New York to face charges there, according to NYPD Chief Detective Joseph Kenny.
Mangione was identified in an Altoona McDonald’s earlier Monday, according to New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. When local police received the report, they discovered that he had “multiple fraudulent IDs,” a U.S. passport, a gun and suppressor that matched those used in the murder, and a “handwritten document that speaks to both his motivation and mindset.”
According to an account of his detention, Mangione became quiet and trembling when officers asked him if he had recently been in New York.
According to authorities, Mangione, a Maryland native, may have gone to college in Pennsylvania, had no prior arrest history in New York or anywhere else in the nation, and was last known to be residing in Honolulu, Hawaii.
According to social media profiles purporting to be for Mangione, he was valedictorian of the Gilman School, a private K–12 institution in Maryland, in 2016 and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.
In a 2016 address, Mangione described his class as “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it.” According to the fresh York Times, he graduated as valedictorian from the all-boys private school.
Prior to graduation in 2020, Mangione was inducted into the Eta Kappa Nu honour society for excellence in electrical and computer engineering, and he formed the school’s Game Research and Development Environment group, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper.
Prior to working as an engineer at TrueCar, a California-based car-shopping website, where he had been worked for four years, Mangione had internships at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics and Firaxis Games, according to a LinkedIn page that seems to be his.
According to the Times, Mangione was employed in 2019 as a counsellor in the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies Program.
Officers discovered a 3D-printed silencer and revolver in Mangione’s rucksack, according to a summary of his detention. A Glock magazine holding six nine-millimeter full metal jacket rounds was placed inside the handgun. The backpack also contained a loose hollow point round measuring nine millimetres. According to authorities, the gun and silencer match the one that was used to shoot Thompson.
According to the University of Pennsylvania’s alumni directory and social media accounts that seem to be his, Mangione received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer and information science in 2020. Prior to graduation in 2020, Mangione was inducted into the Eta Kappa Nu honour society for excellence in electrical and computer engineering, and he formed the school’s Game Research and Development Environment group, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper. He is associated with the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi, according to a post on an Instagram account that appears to be his as well.
In January, a Goodreads review purporting to be Mangione’s gave Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s book “Industrial Society and Its Future” four stars out of five. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” the account’s review stated. However, it is impossible to overlook the fact that many of his prophecies about contemporary society came to pass. Another person’s opinion that “violence is necessary to survive” was also cited in the review.
Have Police Named A Motive?
Police have not named a formal motive in the killing of Thompson. Officers found three 9mm rounds at the scene and bullet casings had the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” on them, which echo a phrase commonly used to criticize tactics insurance companies use to reject claims. At Monday’s press conference, Kenny said the three-page handwritten manifesto found on Mangione when he was arrested is in the possession of the Altoona Police Department, but that “it does seem that he has some ill will toward corporate America.” Kenny also said there were no other “specific threats” to people in the document.
