Luigi Mangione was charged with first-degree murder and second-degree murder as an act of terrorism, among other counts, in an indictment announced by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday. Mangione, 26, faces 11 total counts in the indictment for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in what Bragg called a “brazen, targeted” attack. He faces life without parole.
“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” Bragg said at an afternoon press conference unveiling the charges.
Mangione has been held without bail in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested last week. He expected to appear in court on Thursday for both a preliminary hearing on his Pennsylvania charges and an extradition hearing. Bragg said there’s a chance Mangione would not fight extradition, and that his office is preparing for all possibilities.
On the morning of December 4, Thompson was walking outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan ahead of his company’s annual investor conference there. Prosecutors allege that Mangione, wearing a hood and face mask, waited for nearly an hour for Thompson to appear, then approached him from behind and fired multiple shots, striking him in the back and leg. Thompson was soon pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Mangione then fled the scene and later the city, prompting a nationwide manhunt that turned the Ivy League graduate and scion of a prominent Baltimore family into a kind of folk hero, with many online praising his violent act.
Last week, police officers arrested Mangione at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after receiving a tip that a man resembling him was dining there. Authorities recovered a 3-D-printed gun that appeared to match the murder weapon, as well as a silencer, multiple fake IDs, and a handwritten note that read as a confession. “I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” it read, per the Associated Press.
On Tuesday, NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch strongly condemned any attempts to justify or praise Mangione’s violence. “We don’t celebrate murders, and we don’t lionize the killing of anyone, and any attempt to rationalize this is vile, reckless, and offensive to our deeply held principles of justice,” she said.
