Police arrested a suspect in the brazen Manhattan killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO after a quick-thinking McDonald’s customer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, spotted a man who officers found with a gun, mask, and writings linking him to the ambush.
Suspected healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione in police custody, and his mugshot. pic.twitter.com/WiIhn94FU3
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) December 9, 2024
Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family, had a gun believed to be the one used in last Wednesday’s shooting of Brian Thompson, as well as writings suggesting anger with corporate America, police said.
Luigi Mangione faces a first-degree murder charge in New York in connection with the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, according to an online court docket filed Monday.
Mangione -- the 26-year-old suspect in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson -- was also charged with possession of a loaded firearm, possession of a forged instrument, and criminal possession of a weapon, according to the docket.
The forged instrument is the fake NJ driver’s license he allegedly used to check into the hostel on the Upper West Side.
Mangione remains in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections custody pending his extradition to New York.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office confirmed the charges.
Court records explaining the charges will not be unsealed until Mangione appears in court in New York at a later date.
The New York charges came hours after Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
He had been identified by an employee at a McDonald's, based on photographs circulated by the police of their person of interest in what was called a "brazen, targeted" attack in Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 4.
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections released Mangione's mugshot on Monday evening.
He had been charged earlier in the day with five crimes, including carrying a gun without a license, forgery, falsely identifying himself to authorities, and possessing "instruments of crime," according to the criminal complaint in Pennsylvania.
The charging document alleged that Mangione lied about his identity to police and carried the ghost gun without a license.
The gun and suppressor were "consistent with the weapon used in the murder," NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said following Mangione's arrest on Monday.
During the search of Mangione's backpack upon his arrest, officers allegedly found a black 3-D printed pistol and a black silencer, which was also 3-D printed, according to the criminal complaint.
"The pistol had one loaded Glock magazine with six nine-millimeter full metal jack rounds. There was also one loose nine-millimeter hollow point round," the complaint alleges.
NYPD Chief Detective Joe Kenny described the weapon allegedly found on Mangione as a "ghost gun," meaning it had no serial number and was untraceable.
Also recovered from Mangione at the time of his arrest were several handwritten pages.
Kenny said that the document contained writing that expressed "some ill will toward corporate America."
The writings mention UnitedHealthcare by name, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
The sources described the handwriting as sloppy and included these quotes: “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done."
Police are now looking at Mangione’s travel at various points across the United States and out of the county within the past year, the sources said.
The brazen killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was likely carried out with a ghost gun, one of the nearly untraceable weapons that can be made a home, police said Monday.
A ghost gun is a firearm without a serial number, and police believe the one used in last week’s shooting of Brian Thompson may have been made with a 3D printer. It was capable of firing 9 mm rounds. The man arrested in the crime, Luigi Mangione, also had a sound suppressor or silencer, police said.
Ghost guns have increasingly turned up at crime scenes around the U.S. in recent years.
Here’s a look at the weapons and efforts to regulate them:
What are ghost guns?
The firearms are privately made and have no serial numbers.
Generally, firearms manufactured by licensed companies must have serial numbers — usually displayed on the frame of the gun — that allow officials to trace the gun back to the manufacturer, the firearms dealer, and the original purchaser.
Ghost guns, however, are made of parts that the owner can assemble together. The critical component in building an untraceable gun is what is known as the lower receiver. Some are sold in do-it-yourself kits and the receivers are typically made from metal or polymer. They include semiautomatic handguns and rifles.
Are they legal?
It is legal in the U.S. to build a firearm for personal use. Until about two years ago, ghost gun kits were available online that allowed people to assemble the weapons at home without background checks or age verification.
As police found more ghost guns at crime scenes, the Biden administration moved to add age requirements and background checks in 2022.
Buying one now is more like purchasing a regular gun at a gun shop.
The number of ghost guns has since flattened out or declined in several major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Baltimore, according to court documents.
But gun groups have challenged the regulation in court. The Supreme Court heard the case in October and seemed likely to uphold the regulation. It hasn’t yet handed down a ruling.
Where else have ghost guns been used?
The number of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement increased from 4,000 in 2018 to nearly 20,000 in 2021, according to Justice Department data. However, traditional guns are still used far more often in crimes.
Ghost guns really popped into the public consciousness in 2013 when John Zawahri opened fire on the campus of Santa Monica College in California, killing six people, including his father and brother. Zawahri, who was later shot and killed by police, had assembled an AR-15-style weapon after failing a background check at a gun dealer.
A gunman who killed his wife and four others in Northern California in 2017 built his own weapon to skirt a court order prohibiting him from owning firearms. In 2019, a teenager used a homemade handgun to fatally shoot two classmates and wound three others at a school in suburban Los Angeles.
A mass shooting carried out with an AR-15-style ghost gun left five people dead in Philadelphia in 2023. A ghost gun was also used in a shooting that critically wounded two kindergartners at a tiny religious school in Northern California last week, police said.
Police arrested a 26-year-old man on Monday in the Manhattan killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO after they say a Pennsylvania McDonald’s worker alerted authorities to a customer who resembled the suspected gunman.
The suspect, identified by police as Luigi Nicholas Mangione, had a gun believed to be the one used in Wednesday’s attack on Brian Thompson, as well as writings expressing anger at corporate America, police said.
Here are some of the latest developments in the investigation:
Where was the man captured?
Mangione was taken into custody at around 9:15 a.m. after police received a tip that he was eating at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 85 miles (137 kilometers) east of Pittsburgh, police said.
Mangione was being held in Pennsylvania on gun charges and will eventually be extradited to New York to face charges in connection with Thompson’s death, said NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.
What evidence did police find?
In addition to a three-page, handwritten document that suggests he harbored “ill will toward corporate America,” Kenny said Mangione also had a ghost gun, a type of weapon that can be assembled at home and is difficult to trace.
Officers questioned Mangione, who was acting suspiciously and carrying multiple fraudulent IDs, as well as a U.S. passport, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference. Officers also found a sound suppressor, or silencer, “consistent with the weapon used in the murder,” the commissioner said.
He had clothing and a mask similar to those worn by the shooter and a fraudulent New Jersey ID matching one the suspect used to check into a New York City hostel before the shooting, Tisch said.
What do we know about Mangione?
Kenny said Mangione was born and raised in Maryland, has ties to San Francisco and that his last known address is in Honolulu.
Mangione, who was valedictorian of his Maryland prep school, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, a university spokesman told The Associated Press on Monday.
He learned to code in high school and helped start a club at Penn for people interested in gaming and game design, according to a 2018 story in Penn Today, a campus publication.
His social media posts also suggest that he belonged to the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi. They also show him taking part in a 2019 program at Stanford University, and in photos with family and friends at the Jersey Shore and in Hawaii, San Diego, Puerto Rico, and other destinations.
The Gilman School, from which Mangione graduated in 2016, is one of Baltimore’s elite prep schools. Some of the city’s wealthiest and most prominent people, including Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr., have had children attend the school. Its alumni include sportswriter Frank Deford and former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington.
In his valedictory speech, Luigi Mangione described his classmates’ “incredible courage to explore the unknown and try new things,” according to a post on the school website. He praised their collective inventiveness and pioneering mindset.
Mangione took a software programming internship after high school at Maryland-based video game studio Firaxis, where he fixed bugs on the hit strategy game Civilization 6, according to a LinkedIn profile. Firaxis parent company Take-Two Interactive said Monday it would not comment on former employees.
He more recently worked at the car-buying website TrueCar, according to the head of the Santa Monica, California-based company.
“While we generally don’t comment on personnel matters, we confirm that Luigi Mangione has not been an employee of our company since 2023,” TrueCar CEO Jantoon Reigersman said by email.
Mangione comes from a prominent Maryland family. His grandfather Nick Mangione, who died in 2008, was a successful real estate developer. One of his best-known projects was Turf Valley Resort, a sprawling luxury retreat and conference center outside Baltimore that he purchased in 1978. The father of 10 children, Nick Mangione prepared his five sons — including Luigi Mangione’s father, Louis Mangione — to help manage the family business, according to a 2003 Washington Post report.
The Mangione family also purchased Hayfields Country Club north of Baltimore in 1986. On Monday, Baltimore County police officers blocked off an entrance to the property, which public records link to Luigi Mangione’s parents. Reporters and photographers gathered outside the entrance.
Luigi Mangione is one of 37 grandchildren of Nick Mangione, according to the grandfather’s obituary. Luigi Mangione’s grandparents donated to charities through the Mangione Family Foundation, according to a statement from Loyola University commemorating Nick Mangione’s wife’s death in 2023. They donated to various causes ranging from Catholic organizations to colleges and the arts.
One of Luigi Mangione’s cousins is Republican Maryland state legislator Nino Mangione, a spokesman for the lawmaker’s office confirmed Monday.
The shooting and a quick escape
Police said the person who killed Thompson left a hostel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at 5:41 a.m. on Wednesday.
Just 11 minutes later, he was seen on surveillance video walking back and forth in front of the New York Hilton Midtown, wearing a distinctive backpack.
At 6:44 a.m., he shot Thompson at a side entrance to the hotel, fled on foot, then climbed aboard a bicycle and within four minutes had entered Central Park.
Another security camera recorded the gunman leaving the park near the American Museum of Natural History at 6:56 a.m. still on the bicycle but without the backpack.
After getting in a taxi, he headed north to a bus terminal near the George Washington Bridge, arriving at around 7:30 a.m.
From there, the trail of video evidence runs cold. Police have not located video of the suspect exiting the building, leading them to believe he likely took a bus out of town. Police said they are still investigating the path the suspect took to Pennsylvania.
“This just happened this morning,” Kenny said. “We’ll be working, backtracking his steps from New York to Altoona, Pennsylvania,” Kenny said.
When the identity of the person who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a mystery, Americans grafted their own ideas about the gunman onto the little information available. Now that a person of interest in the case has been arrested, that imagined character is bumping up against the identity and writings of a named suspect, who appears to have left an extensive trail of book reviews, including for an anti-technology manifesto written by the Unabomber and treatises on managing back pain.
Along with a three-page, handwritten manifesto reportedly in the possession of Luigi Mangione upon his arrest, those online traces may offer insight into the motives of a man accused of a killing that touched a nerve for Americans exhausted with profit-hungry healthcare companies.
Much of the online chatter has centered on the book written by Ted Kaczynski, the man known as the Unabomber, who conducted a nearly 20-year campaign of mail bombings designed to reverse society’s accelerating technological revolution.
“You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”
“You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” an account bearing the name and likeness of Mangione wrote on Goodreads in a review of Kaczynski’s 1995 essay “Industrial Society and Its Future.” “Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored, and economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense.”
The book’s anarchist-inflected take on modern society mocked leftists and has recently found a second life on TikTok among people who reject the traditional left-right divide. In 2021, The Baffler described Kaczynski as an “unlikely unifying figure, embraced on TikTok by both jaded environmentalists and right-leaning doomer nihilists.”
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have also cited Kaczynski. “He might not be wrong,” Musk said, of Kaczynski’s insistence that tech had been bad for society.
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Other books drawing Mangione’s interest included a mishmash of self-help bestsellers, pop psychology analyses, and self-optimization volumes such as Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek.”
One of Mangione’s favorite books, judging by his glowing review, was a diagnosis called “What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies” by blogger Tim Urban. The author said in his description of the book that it eschews “the usual left-center-right horizontal political axis” in favor of “a vertical axis that explores how we think, as individuals and as groups.”
“I believe this book will go down in history as one of the most important philosophical texts of the early 21st century,” Mangione wrote.
Urban took to Twitter Monday afternoon with a comment apparently directed at Mangione’s appreciation for his writing: “Very much not the point of the book.”
While Kaczynski’s book provides an obvious possible influence for political violence, other books in Mangione’s reading history also stood out given his alleged target.
They included at least three times about managing pain: “Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance,” “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery,” and “Back Mechanic.”
A Twitter account bearing Mangione’s name featured an X-ray of a back with a surgically implanted medical device.
Details were beginning to leak out Monday about a manifesto that Mangione allegedly had on his person when he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
“These parasites had it coming,” one line in the document said, according to a police official who spoke to CNN. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said the NYPD did not yet have possession of the full, three-page document but that it appeared to betray “some ill will towards corporate America.”