Hunt for CEO’s killer leads to arrest in Pennsylvania

The tipster’s call to local police came in shortly after 9 a.m. Monday from a McDonald’s in western Pennsylvania.

The caller said that a customer there looked like the man in photos shared by New York authorities who were searching for a suspect in the brazen killing of a health insurance executive in Manhattan last week.

When officers arrived at the McDonald’s, on an anonymous, four-lane stretch of road in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that is dotted with chain stores and fast-food restaurants, they approached the customer, Luigi Mangione.

“He was sitting there eating,” Joseph E. Kenny, the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, said at a news conference.

Mangione was wearing a blue surgical mask and had a laptop, according to a criminal complaint. The officers asked him to pull down the mask.

When he did, one of the officers, the complaint says, immediately recognized him as the man being sought in the killing of the executive, Brian Thompson.

Asked by the officers whether he had been in New York recently, the complaint says, Mangione “became quiet and started to shake.”

The officers found that he had several telltale items that might tie him to Thompson’s killing, a crime that has riveted the nation while exposing Americans’ deep-seated anger toward the U.S. health insurance industry.

Mangione, officials said, had a gun and a silencer similar to the ones used in Wednesday’s shooting, and a fake driver’s license that matched one used by the man suspected in the killing.

He also carried with him a three-page handwritten manifesto condemning the health care industry for putting profits over patients.

“These parasites had it coming,” it said, according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. It added: “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”

The document specifically mentioned UnitedHealthcare, the insurance giant where Thompson was CEO, noting its size and the amount of revenue it takes in, the official said.

Altoona police charged Mangione, 26, with five crimes, including carrying a gun without a license, forgery, falsely identifying himself to authorities and possessing “instruments of crime.” He was denied bond after an initial arraignment where he appeared without a lawyer and, according to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, would most likely be transferred to a state prison.

New York Mayor Eric Adams, speaking at the news conference, called Mangione a “strong person of interest” in the killing. New York City officers and Manhattan prosecutors were among those questioning Mangione in Altoona about Thompson’s killing.

So the search for Thompson’s killer came to at least a temporary halt a five-hour drive from the sidewalk where the fatal shooting had occurred.

If Mangione is charged in the killing, he might not return to New York quickly. He could fight extradition from Pennsylvania. If that were to happen, a criminal complaint or indictment in New York could form the basis for a “governor’s warrant,” in which Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York would formally ask Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania to extradite Mangione.

In some ways, Mangione might seem an unlikely assassin.

A high-achieving member of a prominent family, he was born and raised in Maryland and has lived in San Francisco and Honolulu. He attended a top private high school in Baltimore, where he was on the wrestling team and was class valedictorian. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 with engineering degrees in engineering, according to a school commencement program.

Social media accounts that appear to belong to him indicate he had an interest in self-improvement, healthy eating and critiques of contemporary technology.

But he also appears to have receded in recent months from people who knew him, friends said, following health problems related to a back injury. His family was searching for him, friends said. He abandoned personal commitments he had made, social media posts suggest.

Still, he continued to post on social media. Using accounts on Facebook, X, Instagram and Goodreads, he appears to have shared quotations, reviewed books he had read and reflected on algorithms, self-help texts and guides to touring Hawaii.

In January, he posted a review of a book by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, on Goodreads.

“It’s easy to quickly,” he wrote, “write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies.” Mangione added, “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”

One of Mangione’s favorite quotes, as listed on Goodreads, was: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” from Jiddu Krishnamurti, a religious philosopher and teacher.

The weapon Mangione had when he was arrested appeared to be a hard-to-trace ghost gun made from parts sometimes produced by 3D printers, Kenny said at the news conference.

Also in his possession was his manifesto, whose contents could be read as an echo of the message suggested by the words “deny,” “delay” and “depose,” which were found marked on bullet casings at the slaying site.

The words could apply to terms used by insurers to avoid paying claims, as in the title of the 2010 book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.”

“It does seem he has some ill will toward corporate America,” Kenny said.

UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers and a main unit of the conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, has been fiercely criticized by patients, lawmakers and others for its denials of claims.

Thompson became UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in April 2021 after rising through the company ranks for more than 20 years. The division, which reported $281 billion in revenue last year, provides coverage to more than 50 million Americans via plans for individuals, employers and people in government programs like Medicare.

He was on his way into an investors’ gathering at the New York Hilton Midtown on West 54th Street just before sunrise Wednesday when a hooded assassin walked up behind him and calmly shot him at least three times.

The shooter initially escaped capture by running through a nearby passageway, hopping on a bike and riding up Sixth Avenue into Central Park. Police said they believed he had left the city by bus.

UnitedHealthcare said in a statement that the company hoped the arrest “brings some relief to Brian’s family, friends, colleagues and the many others affected by this unspeakable tragedy.”

Mangione’s arrest came with the help of surveillance photos circulated widely by law enforcement authorities.

The day after the killing, police released two images of the man who they believed to be the shooter with his mask down. The images appeared to be from the Upper West Side hostel. In one, he was smiling. They released two more over the weekend, including a shot of the man’s face, his eyes clearly visible, as he sat in the back of a taxi.

Jessica Tisch, New York City’s police commissioner, said at the news conference Monday that the arrest of Mangione was a “combination of old-school detective work and new-age technology.”

“We should never underestimate the power of the public to be our eyes and ears,” she said.

Officials said they believed the man who shot Thompson had arrived in the city Nov. 24 on a bus that had originated in Atlanta. After getting off the bus, officials said, the man had taken a cab to the hotel where the killing occurred in an apparent reconnaissance mission.

On Friday, Kenny gave a detailed breakdown of the shooter’s movements after the killing.

Less than 15 minutes after the killing, Kenny said, the killer had left Central Park just before 7 a.m., still on a bicycle. Minutes later, a security camera filmed him riding at 86th Street and Columbus Avenue. By 7 a.m., he was still on West 86th Street, but no longer on the bike.

From there, he took a cab north the George Washington Bridge Bus Station that is used by interstate buses. Police had an image of him entering the terminal, but not one of his departure.

On Friday, they found a distinctive backpack in Central Park that they believed the shooter might have discarded as he fled the shooting site. Inside the backpack was Monopoly money, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.

The search for clues continued in New York on Monday, with police dragging a lake in the park in hopes of finding the murder weapon.

Around the same time, a sharp-eyed McDonald’s employee 300 miles away appeared to be giving investigators the break they needed.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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