Alleged shooter of US healthcare CEO caught – police

A 26-year-old Ivy League university graduate suspected in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City has been tracked down and arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, the NYPD has announced.

Thompson was fatally shot on Wednesday morning in Manhattan by a masked, hooded attacker who was apparently waiting for him. The suspect escaped to Central Park where he left a backpack and then disappeared.

On Monday morning, police arrested Luigi Nicholas Mangione at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania – about 440km west of New York City. An employee at the restaurant reportedly recognized him by the distinct eyebrows on the wanted poster.

Mangione was found with a gun and a silencer “consistent with those used in the murder,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a press conference after the arrest was announced.

“He was sitting there eating,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters.

The fake ID Mangione showed detectives at the restaurant had the name ‘Mark Rosario’, the same name the suspect used to rent a room in New York, according to police. Officers also recovered a handwritten manifesto that reportedly said, “These parasites had it coming,” as well as other fake IDs, and a face mask.

“At this time, he is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder of Brian Thompson,” Tisch said. In the meantime, Mangione was detained on gun charges.

Police believe Mangione’s motive to shoot Thompson was the healthcare industry’s treatment of a sick relative, the New York Post reported, citing unnamed sources. One of the banner photos on Mangione’s social media shows an X-ray of a serious spinal injury.

Mangione’s social media accounts, still active as of Monday evening, shows him as a native of Towson, Maryland who was valedictorian at the Gilman School in Baltimore in 2016, before going on to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in computer science. He worked for a California-based car company, but his last known address was in Hawaii.

Mangione’s X account featured mostly reposts promoting climate activism, lab-grown food, and fitness. He has retweeted neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and World Economic Forum ideologue Yuval Noal Harari, praised a book by Tim Urban as “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century,” and argued that the solution to falling birthrates involves encouraging “natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality.”

The book review site Goodreads shows him as having read 295 titles. Among the many books he reviewed was ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’ by Ted Kaczynski, the infamous ‘Unabomber’.