The largest manhunt in recent U.S. history ended in the dining room of a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning.
It was there that two police officers encountered a man hunched over a laptop who, after pulling down a surgical mask, matched the description of the person wanted for gunning down UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in Manhattan, according to court documents. When the officers asked the man if he had been to New York recently, he “became quiet and began to shake.” After allegedly offering the officers a fake ID, he admitted he was, in fact, Luigi Mangione.
Mangione, 26, was denied bail during an initial court appearance that same evening in Pennsylvania, where he remains in custody. Manhattan prosecutors subsequently charged him with second-degree murder and issued a warrant for his arrest in order to be extradited to stand trial in New York. He is also charged with three gun charges and forgery for the ID.
A handwritten note was recovered with a loaded 3-D-printed gun, a silencer, and several fake IDs that officials say tie him to the murder. The note reportedly stated that Mangione made himself out to be fighting what he called a corrupt and greedy health-care system, attacking UnitedHealthcare by name: “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.” When officers 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 large swath of the public, which reacted with sympathy for the killer, sometimes slipping into glee for the heinous crime.
Soon after Mangione’s arrest, a portrait emerged of a young man born of privilege who veered down an increasingly isolated path that authorities say ended violently.
A prominent Baltimore son goes adrift
Mangione belongs to an eminent Maryland family with ties to real estate and state politics. The Baltimore Banner reports that his family owns two recreational properties in the state and a group of nursing and assisted-living facilities they founded, and his cousin Nino is a Republican Maryland delegate. Mangione attended the Gilman School, a private all-boys high school in Baltimore where tuition is more than $35,000 per year. Former teachers and classmates told the Washington Post they remembered the valedictorian as an exceedingly bright and well-liked student.
In 2020, Mangione graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in engineering and computer science, according to his LinkedIn profile. 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. Fraternity brothers recalled him being a standard, beer-pong-playing frat guy. After college, he worked remotely for several years as a data engineer for an online car retailer.
He spent part of that period in Hawaii, posting on Instagram like a 20-something digital nomad and staying at a co-living and co-working space called Surfbreak HNL in Honolulu. According to a representative for the company, he paid $2,000 a month for a small bedroom on the 40th floor of a tower for the first half of 2022, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with others. Guests have to pass a rigorous screening process, including background check, which he easily did. “He seemed to be pretty well loved,” the representative said. “You live in pretty close quarters with people, so you get to know each other well.” He then moved to live elsewhere in Hawaii.
“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 Surfbreak’s owner, R.J. Martin. “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.”
The ever-present smile in photos masked physical and psychological pain. Now-deleted Reddit posts found by CNN, which match up with details of Mangione’s life, said the user was suffering from chronic back pain, Lyme disease, and “brain fog” since college. The posts also expressed anger at the medical community: “It’s absolutely brutal to have such a life-halting issue … The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms — they certainly don’t for me.” Martin told a Hawaii publication that his friend underwent surgery for the back pain earlier this year.
By that time, Mangione had begun withdrawing from those closest to him and had evidently moved to Japan, as he wrote online. In the spring, he began corresponding with Gurwinder Bhogal, a U.K.-based Substack writer, who said they exchanged emails and had a two-hour video call. “He also mentioned Japanese culture was too rigid and rule-bound for his liking,” Bhogal said. “We briefly touched on the differences between the U.K. and U.S. health-care systems. Luigi complained about how expensive health care in the U.S. was and expressed envy at the U.K.’s nationalized health system.”
Something seems to have changed following the back operation, after which Martin said Mangione went “radio silent in June or July.” Another friend told the New York Times that he was forwarded a message from the Mangiones saying they had “not heard from him in several months after his surgery. Relatives were hoping friends might know of his whereabouts.” By mid-November, his family had reported him missing to San Francisco police, though it is unclear why they believed he might have been there. When asked in court if he was in contact with family members, Mangione only said “until recently.”
“Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” Mangione’s family said in a statement. “We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved.”
On X, he 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,” Mangione wrote in his review. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” He 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.”
Bhogal said they also talked about Kaczynski in a discussion of a Substack article of his “about the gamification of society with a focus on the life and thought of the Unabomber. Luigi disapproved of the Unabomber’s actions but was fascinated by his ideology and shared his concerns about rampant consumerism gradually eroding our agency and alienating us from ourselves.”
Mangione drew on the Unabomber’s example in preparation for the attack, authorities say. In a notebook recovered during his arrest, according to CNN, he referenced the late domestic terrorist and mused about using a bomb to kill Thompson, but ruled it out because it “could kill innocents.”
Politically speaking, Bhogal said Mangione was hard to pin down. “He was also left wing on some things and right wing on others,” he explained. “For instance, he was pro-equality (of opportunity) but anti-woke (i.e., anti-DEI, anti–identity politics). He opposed wokeism because he didn’t believe it was an effective way to help minorities. He expressed interest in more rational, evidence-based forms of compassion, like effective altruism. He asked me how I decided which issues to be left on and which to be right on, so we discussed that.”
“Overall, the impression I got of him, besides his curiosity and kindness, was a deep concern for the future of humanity and a determination to improve himself and the world,” Bhogal said.
A head start runs out in Altoona
The massive manhunt began this past Wednesday morning at the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan, 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, apparently to 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 through midtown and Central Park before the trail went cold at the bus terminal in upper Manhattan. Within a few hours, he had eluded the nation’s largest police department, which has access to thousands of cameras, and disappeared.
Police officers and detectives scoured the getaway route for footage, working backward to create a timeline of the lead-up to the crime in the hopes of unmasking the killer. They discovered the gunman had arrived in the city ten days earlier from an interstate bus that originated in Atlanta. He then checked into an Upper West Side hostel on November 30 with a fake New Jersey ID. It was there that he briefly let his guard down, lowering his face mask to reportedly flirt with a person working the front desk. The moment was captured by a security camera. On December 4, the day of the shooting, the masked man had been 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. Throughout, investigators believed he paid cash. Mangione was found with $10,000 in cash, including foreign currency, and a passport.
After leaving Central Park, the gunman hailed a taxi and headed to the bus terminal, but not before a camera looking into the back seat captured another image of his face. The NYPD immediately released the photos in hopes of identifying the suspect, and 300 miles away in a McDonald’s, an employee recognized a man inside as the same one in the photos owing to his distinctive features, such as thick eyebrows. When officers asked for identification, Mangione allegedly flashed the same fake ID used at the hostel. After police ran the ID and came up empty with a match, they asked why he lied about his name. “I clearly shouldn’t have,” he responded, according to court papers, and was placed under arrest.
Jessica Tisch, the new NYPD commissioner, credited “the greatest detectives in the world” for gathering the evidence that led to Mangione’s capture. Still, he was not identified for nearly a week after he allegedly opened fire in the middle of one of the world’s most heavily surveilled cities. During a press conference following the arrest, a Pennsylvania law-enforcement official said Mangione had crisscrossed the state from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh after leaving the city, keeping a low profile and trying to avoid more cameras.
With additional reporting by John Herrman and Andrew Rice
More on the UnitedHealthcare Shooting
- Luigi Mangione Charged With Terrorism in Killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- The Bigger Vigilante-Worship Problem Is Happening on the Right
