Luigi Mangione charged with murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson

Luigi Mangione, who was spotted in a McDonald’s, is an Ivy League graduate who was carrying a ‘ghost gun’ when arrested in connection with the killing of CEO Brian Thompson.

Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder over named as the suspect in the shooting of Brian Thompson.

New York prosecutors have charged a former tech worker with murder over the targeted killing of UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson with a ghost gun outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

Police arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League graduate, at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s after a frenzied manhunt.

A McDonald’s employee in Pennsylvania called the police after Mr Mangione was seen eating in the restaurant. Mr Mangione was sitting looking at a silver laptop when the police approached him, according to local Altoona police.

He was wearing a blue medical mask that they asked him to lower, the officers said.

“We just didn’t think twice about it. We knew that was our guy,” Tyler Frye, one of the two responding officers, told a news conference.

Mr Mangione provided the officers with a New Jersey driver’s licence bearing the name Mark Rosario. The officers said Mr Mangione “became quiet and started to shake” when they asked if he had been to New York recently. He gave his name as Luigi Mangione after police told him he was under official investigation.

When asked why he gave a fake name, he replied: “I clearly shouldn’t have.”

During a search of his backpack, police said they found a pistol and silencer, both produced by 3-D printing. The pistol had a magazine with six 9-millimeter rounds inside.

Mr Mangione also had a handwritten three-page document that showed “some ill will toward corporate America”, said NYPD chief of detectives Joseph Kenny.

Mr Mangione was charged on suspicion of one count of murder as well as felony weapons and forgery charges among other lesser offences.

Police believe Mr Mangione travelled from New York by bus after fatally shooting Mr Thompson early Wednesday outside a Manhattan hotel before an investor meeting. Mr Thompson was the chief executive of insurer UnitedHealthcare.

The suspect wrote the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” on bullet cartridges that are believed to have come from his gun, a law-enforcement official said. Those words are close to a phrase commonly associated with tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims. The assassin ambushed Thompson, shooting him in the back with a gun that had a suppressor, a surveillance video shows.

An image of the suspect in custody.

Lieutenant Colonel George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police said investigators are digging through numerous details about Mr Mangione’s movements since he arrived in the state, including businesses he visited, as well as what they can glean from his writing and electronic devices.

“We know that he’s been in Pennsylvania for several days so part of that investigation will involve retracing his steps,” Colonel Bivens said. “All of that is becoming a mountain of evidence.” He said the evidence will also be used to determine whether Mr Mangione had an accomplice who is still at large.

Colonel Bivens also said Mr Mangione had initially been cooperative but no longer is. Mr Mangione appeared to be very careful and to avoid cameras, Colonel Bivens said.

Investigators say they have a good idea of his path, with stops in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but there are still gaps in the timeline.

Mr Mangione was arraigned in an ornate, high-ceilinged courtroom in the Blair County Court House in Hollidaysburg, Pa. He entered with his ankles and wrists cuffed and was seated at a defence table with about eight officers, including some from the New York City Police Department, standing behind him.

A booking photo of Luigi Mangione released by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

A judge denied Mr Mangione bail. Prosecutors said that he was carrying $US8000 in cash and that he had bags for his electronic devices that block electromagnetic signals, which they said showed a level of criminal sophistication. Mr Mangione denied carrying that much cash and said he used the bags because they were waterproof.

Wearing dark pants and a sweatshirt, Mr Mangione was sombre throughout the proceeding and gave short answers to the judge’s questions, including a “yes, sir” as to whether he understood the charges. He didn’t have a lawyer with him, and when the judge asked if he wanted a public defender appointed to him, he asked to respond at a later time.

Suspect’s background

Police said Mr Mangione was born and raised in Maryland. He had ties to San Francisco and his last known address was in Honolulu.

Mangione’s family said Monday that they couldn’t comment on news reports. “We only know what we have read in the media. Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” the family said in the statement released by Nino Mangione, Luigi Mangione’s cousin and who is a Republican politician in Maryland.

Mr Mangione is an anti-capitalist Ivy League graduate who liked online quotes from “Unabomber’’ Ted Kaczynski — and wrote in a manifesto “These parasites had it coming”, law-enforcement sources told The New York Post.

The Post reported that Mr Mangione apparently hated the medical community because of how it treated his sick relative. Online obituaries show he lost a grandmother in 2013 and a grandfather in 2017.

The manifesto mirrored the quotes that Mr Mangione posted on his Goodreads account from Kaczynski, who terrorised the country for nearly two decades before his arrest in 1996.

“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness,’’ Kaczynski wrote at one point in a quote liked by Mr Mangione.

He also subscribed to anti-capitalist and climate-change causes, the Post reported.

The manifesto said the suspect acted alone, sources said.

Mr Kenny described the weapon that Mr Mangione was carrying as a “ghost gun”. He also was carrying a mask that matched the one worn by the person wanted in the murder and had in his possession fake IDs similar to those used by the killer ahead of the slaying and a “handwritten document” that New York City police commissioner Jessica Tisch said speaks to the motivation behind the crime.

Fatal attack

Mr Thompson was fatally shot early Wednesday on his way into a Midtown Manhattan hotel for an investor meeting.

The father of two, who lived in Minnesota, was ambushed in what police called a “brazen, targeted attack”.

The arrest and charges followed days of labour-intensive police work that included scanning surveillance footage, interviewing witnesses, tracking down tips and leads and gathering evidence for forensic analysis.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a New York hotel. Picture: AFP

The New York City Police Department said Friday they believed the suspect left the state on a bus. Authorities found surveillance footage showing the suspect entering Central Park on an e-bike, taking a taxi up the west side of Manhattan and entering a bus station.

By Friday, NYPD detectives had pieced together a timeline of the suspect’s movements on the day of the shooting, and his arrival in the city some 10 days earlier. Police had searched a hostel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday, where they believe the man might have stayed.

The assailant got to New York City on November 24 just after 10pm police said, on a bus that originated in Atlanta but made several stops along the way.

The morning of the shooting, the suspect was in the area outside the Hilton hotel for nearly 30 minutes, Mr Kenny told CNN on Friday.

Before the shooting, he visited a Starbucks and made purchases with cash, a law-enforcement official said. Investigators recovered a cellphone in an alley near the shooting.

Mr Thompson’s wife told NBC News that he had received threats potentially linked to issues of healthcare coverage.

His killing brought fresh attention to corporate security concerns in the insurance industry. Health-insurance executives said it’s not unusual for companies and their leaders to be threatened or sued by customers, often over high costs or rejected coverage.

Dow Jones, Barrons, AFP