Luigi Mangione has been arrested as a person of interest in the shooting death of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot on a busy midtown Manhattan sidewalk in broad daylight last week.
The person of interest was picked up at a McDonald’s location near Altoona, Pennsylvania after an employee thought he looked suspicious and called police. Police found on him a gun similar to the one used to kill Thompson last week, along with a silencer, per NBC4 New York.
He also had on his person a fake New Jersey ID matching the one used by the shooter to check into a Manhattan hostel last week, according to the outlet, under the name “Marc Rosario.”
New York Police Department Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that the person of interest picked up had a manifesto that speaks to “speaks to both his motivation and mindset.”
According to CNN, citing police officials who allegedly saw the document, he wrote, “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done” — and said he acted alone and was self-funded.
Mangione has not been charged in relation to Thompson’s death but was picked up on a firearms charge.
“At this time he is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare last Wednesday in midtown Manhattan,” said Tisch alongside NY Mayor Eric Adams in a press conference on Monday.
“It does seem that he had some ill will toward corporate America,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters at the briefing.
As police continue their investigation into the shooting and what, if any, possible connection Mangione may have had with the death of Thompson, here’s everything we know so far about the NYPD’s person of interest.
According to NBC4 New York, Mangione graduated valedictorian of is class in 2016 at the all-boys Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. Tuition at the school is reportedly $37,690 per year, according to The New York Times.
According to his Twitter bio, Mangione holds a B.S.E. and M.S.E. in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in May 2020, according to a spokesperson who spoke with ABC 7 Eyewitness News.
Among the coursework he studied there, per his LinkedIn page, were classes in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Data Structures and Algorithms, and Probability. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity during his time there, based on his own Instagram posts.
The 26-year-old was born and raised in Maryland before moving to live in Honolulu, Hawaii until recently, as reported by The Independent. He also has reported ties to San Francisco.
Police are reportedly investigating if he traveled by bus from Philadelphia to Altoona, where he was spotted some 240 miles away on Monday. Police said he arrived by bus in New York City in late November.
While he hasn’t been active on social media in recent years, his presence was quickly discovered on both Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). Mangione has not posted on X since June, while it’s been more than three years since he posted to IG.
His follower count was below 100 on X before news broke, while he was at fewer than 1000 followers on Instagram. Both numbers have since started to climb dramatically.
Mangione’s first post to his Instagram was a shout-out to his sister Lucia, followed by a series of holiday pictures, travel shots, and social gatherings with friends and family.
His latest share to X was a repost of a podcast talking about smart phones and social media and how they can rewire the brain and impact mental health. His pinned post at the top of his feed is him recalling his high school senior speech on artificial intelligence.
Most of Mangione’s recent content features reposts of stories tearing down the industrialized food industry, anxiety and caffeine, the dangers of atheism and DEI, contrasted with stories promoting the use of psychedelic drugs as therapy.
Mangione also had a GoodReads account, where he posted in January 2024 that he was actively reading Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, as well as How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, both by Michael Pollan.
Books he expressed an interest in reading include Martin J. Rees’ Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s warning – How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century — On Earth and Beyond, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and George Orwell’s 1984.
His list also included books on diet and health, as well as several that appear to be about overcoming pain, including Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery, Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds, and Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance.
Mangione also reviewed a few books himself, including a take written January 31, 2024, on the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.
“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,” Mangione wrote.
“He was a violent individual – rightfully imprisoned – who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
Mangione went on to share someone else’s “take” on the book he said he found “interesting”. That “take” from an unidentified individual began, “Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right. Oil barons haven’t listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him.”
This “take” argued, “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”
“These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids,” this shared “take” continued. “. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?”
“We’re animals just like everything else on this planet, except we’ve forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival,” the shared “take” concluded. “‘Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
Among more than 100 quotes shared from philosophers and authors on his GoodReads profile, Mangione also had one from Kaczynski: “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
On May 14, 2024, Mangione shared a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five that began, “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.”
Another passage from Vonnegut that Mangione quoted reads, “Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.”
In the quotes section, the first one Mangione shares is one from Joe De Sena’s The Spartan Way: Eat Better. Train Better. Think Better. Be Better. That quote reads, “They say a healthy person has a thousand wishes but a sick person has only one wish—to get well.”
Additional books included various science fiction and fantasy books, as well as books by and about Elon Musk, Steve-O, J.D. Vance. Added in January 2024 were books on Hawaii and his fields of study.
