Luigi Mangioni in custody over shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson
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Updated 2 minutes ago
Dow Jones
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Luigi Mangione Has Been Named As The Suspect In The Shooting Of Brian Thompson.
Police Have Named A 26-Year-Old Man As The Person Of Interest In the killing of a UnitedHealth executive as he was taken into custody in Pennsylvania after a dayslong manhunt.
New York City police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, identified the man as Luigi Mangione, saying he is “believed to be our person of interest” in the shooting of UnitedHealth Chief Executive Brian Thompson.
Ms Tisch said Mr Mangione was recognised by an employee at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, who called the police.
He was carrying a weapon that New York Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny described as a “ghost gun” capable of firing 9MM rounds and equipped with a suppressor. 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 Ms Tisch said speaks to the motivation behind the crime.
“We don’t think that there is any specific threats to other people mentioned in that document,” the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, Joseph Kenny, said. Mr Kenny said the document was three pages and that it suggested he had “ill will towards corporate America.”
He said Mr Mangione was born and raised in Maryland, “has ties” to San Francisco, and most recently lived in Honolulu.
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 reports 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 reports.
The manifesto said the suspect acted alone, sources said.
Fatal attack
Mr Thompson was fatally shot early Wednesday on his way into a Midtown Manhattan hotel for an investor meeting. The suspect wrote the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” on bullets that are believed to have come from his gun, a law-enforcement official said. Those words are commonly associated with tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims.
The questioning in Pennsylvania comes after days of labour-intensive police work that has 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. Police are offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest in the case. The FBI is offering up to $50,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the crime.
The NYPD said Monday morning it didn’t have anything to share in response to questions about the person of interest being questioned in Pennsylvania.
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 Nov. 24 just after 10pm police said, on a bus that originated in Atlanta but made several stops along the way.
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The morning of the shooting, the suspect was in the area outside the Hilton hotel for nearly 30 minutes, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told CNN on Friday.
He fled the scene on a bike and rode into Central Park, where investigators believe he might have abandoned a backpack. Officers found a bag there that looked similar days later.
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 was ambushed in what police called a “brazen, targeted attack.” The father of two, who lived in Minnesota, was in the city for an investor meeting. He was heading to the event to help set up when he was shot, police said. Executives cut the event short after the attack.
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
