Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder in connection to the death of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside his Manhattan hotel on December 4.
Thompson, 50, was shot dead on December 4 outside the New York Hilton Midtown. That launched a massive manhunt for the suspect who eluded police for nearly a week until the 26-year-old was spotted eating a meal inside a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania after an employee recognized him from the photos circulating online and tipped off police.
He is currently being held in a federal detention in New York where he faces 11 counts, including murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
The Ivy League graduate also faces firearm-related charges in Pennsylvania and stalking and murder charges at the federal level. He has not yet made pleas in those venues.
Here is what we know about Mangione, the man police say committed the crime:
Tip from the public led police to Pennsylvania
On December 9, police responded to a tip from a McDonald’s employee in Altoona, Pennsylvania, who said they saw a man who looked like the person of interest from the case.
He was eating in the McDonald’s when he was recognized by the employee, police said. Officers arrived at the restaurant and began questioning Mangione.
Police “asked the male if he had been to New York recently and the male became quiet and started to shake,” according to a later criminal complaint filed against the 26-year-old.
“We didn’t think twice about it,” Altoona police officer Tyler Frye said of encountering Mangione. “We knew that was our guy.”
The officers arrested Mangione after he provided a fake ID card. A police search revealed he had a ghost gun that matches the weapon believed to have been used in the assassination-style killing, officials said on December 9.
Mangione also possessed a silencer, a 262-word manifesto, a spiral notebook containing a “to-do list”, and several false ID cards.
“He was initially cooperative. He is not now,” Lt Colonel George Bivens of Pennsylvania State Police said during a press conference at the time.
Charges in Pennsylvania and New York
After his arrest, Mangione was charged and arraigned on five Pennsylvania offenses including forgery, falsely identifying himself, and carrying a gun without a license.
On December 10, he made a brief appearance at the Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg where he was informed of the charges against him and said he understood.
The suspect returned to the Blair County Courthouse for an extradition hearing after New York prosecutors charged him with second-degree murder in connection with the brazen killing of Thompson in Midtown Manhattan.
“It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience,” Mangione yelled as he was escorted in handcuffs into the courthouse.
After waiving his right to an extradition hearing over New York murder charges, he was taken to the Empire State on December 19.
Prosecutors in New York also announced that he had been charged with murder as an act of terrorism, in addition to the murder charge.
Under New York law, such a charge can be brought when an alleged crime is “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping.”
In total, he faces 11 counts in New York. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Federal prosecutors also announced charges against Mangione on December 19: one count of using a firearm to commit murder, one count of interstate stalking resulting in death, one count of stalking through use of interstate facilities resulting in death and one count of discharging a firearm that was equipped with a silencer in furtherance of a crime of violence.
At his December 23 arraignment in New York, his attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo told the court the “warring jurisdictions” had turned her client into a “human ping-pong ball.”
He is set to appear for a pretrial hearing in New York Criminal Court on February 21.
Three-page ‘manifesto’ and ‘to-do list’ discovered
Police said they found a three-page manifesto in Mangione’s possession when he was arrested, which suggests he has “an ill will towards corporate America,” Joseph Kenny, NYPD’s chief of detective, told the press conference.
The handwritten document “speaks to both his motivation and mindset,” said NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
It reportedly said “these parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” according to CNN, who cited a police official who has seen the document.
A “to-do list” was also found inside a spiral notebook that was gleaned from the suspect along with other evidence at the Altoona McDonald’s on December 9, a law enforcement source told CNN.
Mangione apparently mulled the idea of using a bomb in Manhattan in his alleged plot to kill the UnitedHealth CEO, the source said. He allegedly decided against using the bomb as it “could kill innocents” and instead opted for a more targeted approach “to kill the CEO at his own bean counting conference.”
Mangione was aware that UnitedHealthcare was holding an investors’ conference in Midtown Manhattan around the time Thompson was shot dead, according to Kenny. He added that the suspect mentioned in the list that he was going to the conference site.
Suspect went missing after spine surgery
Just two weeks before the UnitedHealth CEO was gunned down in Manhattan, Mangione’s mother, Kathleen, reported him missing to the San Francisco police on November 18, a source told The San Francisco Standard.
The suspect had previously suffered from debilitating, chronic back pain and underwent major surgery for it in 2023, and in the months after had lost touch with friends and family, an acquaintance told The New York Times.
RJ Martin – a friend of Mangione and spokesperson of Surfbreak, a co-living space in Honolulu, where Mangione lived for about six months until April 2022 – told the newspaper that the suspect had moved to Hawaii in a bid to get as healthy as possible in advance of the operation.
“His spine was kind of misaligned,” Martin said. “He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve. Sometimes he’d be doing well and other times not.”
In the months after allegedly undergoing surgery in 2023, Mangione lost touch with friends and relatives, according to police sources, accounts from his friends and social media posts.
“Nobody has heard from you in months,” one seemingly concerned social media user tweeted on his X page in October. An early post from July read: “I don’t know if you are okay or just in a super isolated place and have no service. But I haven’t heard from you in months.”
Valedictorian at private school and Ivy League educated
Mangione attended the Gilman School in Baltimore, a private all-boys school, where he was valedictorian in 2016, The New York Times first reported. Tuition at the school is $37,690 per year.
Mangione gave a speech where he described his class as “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it.”
According to his apparent LinkedIn profile, Mangione has a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
A former classmate told The Independent that he never gave off the “Unabomber vibe” in his college days.
A Facebook profile matching the name of the person of interest offers a glimpse into their life, with photos of friends on the beach in Mexico, exploring the California coast, and going to soccer matches.
Mangione hails from a prominent Baltimore-area family, The Baltimore Bannerreports.
His grandparents Nicholas Mangione Sr and Mary Mangione were real estate developers with interests in country clubs, nursing homes, and a radio station. Maryland GOP state delegate Nino Mangione is a cousin of the arrested man.
Person of interest gave Unabomber’s manifesto four stars on Goodreads
Mangione appears to have left a positive review for the Unabomber’s manifesto online earlier this year, and praised the killer as a “political revolutionary.”
An account under that name on the book review website Goodreads, which also matches photos of the suspect on other social media platforms, gave Ted Kaczynski’s book a four-star review in January.
“Clearly written by a mathematics prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st-century quality of life,” the review reads.
“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,” the review continues.
Kaczynski’s brother David has said that he hopes that Mangione did not view his sibling as a role model.
“His actions are like a virus,” he told NBC News. “Many factors go into a person’s motivation that they drastically act like this, and I hope my brother wasn’t in a way a key model for him.”
Hundreds of hours of footage combed through
Investigators combed through hundreds of hours of video from multiple sources to find the crucial screenshot that linked them to the person of interest, Kenny told the press conference.
NYPD quickly issued surveillance images of the suspect unmasked and smiling the day after Thompson was fatally shot.
It emerged that the clear surveillance images of the person of interest where he is smiling came from a “flirtatious” moment with a female employee at the hostel where he was believed to be staying.
“They were having a flirtatious moment and he pulls it down and he gives a big smile and that one informal moment between two human beings remains at this moment the most significant clue to date in this whole case,” former NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller told CBS News at the time.
