United Healthcare CEO's Killer Turns Out to Be 'Super Normal' Prestigious University Graduate

In the center of New York on December 4th United Healthcare CEO KilledThe shooter turned out to be a graduate of a prestigious university. Intelligencer tells the details.

The largest manhunt in modern U.S. history ended at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on the morning of December 9.

That's where police encountered a man hunched over a laptop. When he removed his surgical mask, he matched the description of a man wanted for the murder of Manhattan health insurance executive Brian Thompson.

When police asked him if he had recently been to New York, the man became silent and began shaking.

After showing officers a fake ID, the suspect admitted that he was actually Luigi Mangione.

On the subject: Man who strangled troublemaker in New York subway acquitted

Mangione, 26, was denied bail at his initial court appearance that evening in Pennsylvania. Manhattan prosecutors subsequently charged him with murder, as well as weapons possession and forgery.

Mangione was found in possession of a loaded pistol, a silencer, several fake IDs and a note.

When officers investigated the scene of Thompson's murder, they found the words "delay" and "deny" written on the shell casings. These are terms often used by insurance companies when denying customer claims.

The findings suggested that Thompson, 50, had been deliberately killed in a potential act of revenge against the country's largest insurer. Anger at the insurance industry was shared by a large part of the public. People reacted with sympathy for the killer. They even went so far as to celebrate the heinous crime.

"To the Feds: I'll keep this brief because I respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I'll state outright that I have not worked with anyone," reads the note found on Mangione.

Shortly after the arrest, information emerged about the young man. He was born into a privileged family but turned to violence.

A Promising Son from Baltimore

Mangione comes from a prominent Maryland family with ties to real estate and state politics. His relatives own two vacation properties in the state and a group of nursing and assisted living facilities.

There, according to Mangione's LinkedIn profile, he previously worked as a volunteer.

His paternal grandparents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, were real estate developers who purchased two country clubs: Turf Valley in 1978 and Hayfields in Hunt Valley in 1986.

Mangione attended Gilman, a private all-boys high school in Baltimore that charges more than $35 a year. Former teachers and classmates said they remember Mangione as extremely smart and well-liked.

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 with degrees in engineering and computer science.

A student who attended an Ivy League college at the same time as Mangione described him as "super normal" and "an intelligent person."

Mangione received additional education in mathematics with a specialization in artificial intelligence. While still a student, he founded a club for video game programmers.

“I was into a lot of independent games in high school, but I wanted to make my own game, so I learned how to code,” Mangione, then a third-year student, said in an interview.

He has worked remotely for the past four years as a data programmer for an online car dealership.

He spent part of that period in Hawaii, posting on Instagram like a 20-year-old digital nomad.

“Luigi was an incredibly thoughtful, compassionate person. We had many, deep conversations with him about not only the state of world affairs, but what we could do to improve society,” said Honolulu coworking space owner R.J. Martin. “I don’t believe it could have been him. I mean, when you’re talking about just a good person, somebody you were lucky enough to spend time with, somebody who was just thoughtful and had a good heart. That’s Luigi.”

The constant smile in the photos hid physical and psychological pain. His deleted Reddit posts said the user had been suffering from chronic back pain, Lyme disease, and “brain fog” since college. His posts expressed anger at the medical community.

"It's absolutely cruel to have to live like this because of a problem... People around you probably won't understand your symptoms - they certainly won't understand mine," Mangione wrote.

He had surgery for back pain earlier this year, and something seemed to have changed after that.

Mangione has disappeared and has stopped communicating with family and friends. The background image on his X account shows an X-ray of his spine with a stabilization system installed.

On X, he followed various accounts befitting a typical young man online.

His greatest interest, of course, was in the work of Tim Urban, a writer and illustrator popular with techies who publishes scientific explanations and political articles about how polarization is bad and rationalism can save the world.

There was one notable exception to his innocuous online footprint, however. Earlier this year, he wrote a positive review of the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, who murdered and maimed people he believed had destroyed the world with technology. Mangione acknowledged that Kaczynski was a brutal man who killed innocent people. But, as Mangione said, what Kaczynski wrote should not be considered the manifesto of a madman, but rather the work of a radical political revolutionary.

"Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi's arrest," the Mangione family said in a statement. "We send our prayers to Brian Thompson's family and ask that people pray for everyone involved."

From "good guy" to cold-blooded killer

Thompson was on his way to speak at a UnitedHealth Group investor conference on Dec. 4 when вооруженный a man came up behind him and fired several shots. Surveillance footage shows Thompson, dressed in a blue suit, walking down a relatively quiet street. The footage shows the shooter approaching him from behind and opening fire. Thompson stumbles, and the witness runs to safety. The next shot shows the shooter continuing to fire, and Thompson falls to the ground. It all happened outside the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan.

The shooter crossed the street and zigzagged his bike through Midtown and Central Park before disappearing at a bus station in Upper Manhattan. Within hours, he had eluded the nation's largest police agency, which has access to thousands of cameras, and vanished.

Detectives discovered that the shooter had arrived in the city 30 days earlier on a bus from Atlanta, Georgia. Then on Nov. XNUMX, he checked into an Upper West Side hostel using a fake New Jersey ID — the one officials say was later found on Mangione. That’s where he briefly let his guard down, removing his mask and flirting with a woman working the front desk. The moment was captured on surveillance video.

On Dec. 4, the day of the shooting, a masked man was spotted at a Starbucks a few blocks from the Hilton. He threw away a water bottle and a protein bar, from which police obtained a smeared fingerprint and DNA. Investigators believed throughout that he paid in cash. Mangione was found to have $10 in cash, including foreign currency and a passport.

After leaving Central Park, the shooter hailed a cab and headed to the bus station. A camera looking into the backseat captured another image of his face. The NYPD immediately released the photos in hopes of identifying the suspect. At McDonald's, an employee recognized the suspect.

However, Mangione was not identified by law enforcement prior to his arrest.