Towson Man Identified as Person of Interest in Fatal Shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO

By NY Post
Posted on 12/09/24 | News Source: NY Post

The person of interest identified in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is an anti-capitalist former Ivy League student — who liked online quotes from “Unabomber’’ Ted Kaczynski raging against the country’s medical community.

Tech whiz Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Md., was taken into custody Monday morning at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., after an intense manhunt following the coldblooded execution of Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel last week, sources said.

He has not been charged.

The former prep-school valedictorian was caught with a manifesto that appeared to list grievances with the healthcare industry including taking on their enormous profits and alleged shady motives, sources said.

He is believed to have acted alone, and it was unclear if he had yet made any statements.

He is believed to have acted alone, and it was unclear if he had yet made any statements.

Mangione has subscribed to anti-capitalist and climate-change causes in addition to showing he despises the healthcare industry in the country, according to law-enforcement sources, citing online activity gleaned by authorities.

On the Goodreads website, Mangione’s account shows quotes he particularly likes ranging from Socrates to Bruce Lee — to wacky anti-establishment Ted Kaczynski, the infamous “Unabomber’’ who terrorized the country for nearly two decades by planting deadly bombs before he was nabbed in 1996.

• Brian Thompson, the CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down Wednesday outside a luxury Midtown hotel in a “brazen, targeted attack,” police said.
• The methodical killer used a firearm with a silencer outside the Hilton hotel along Sixth Avenue.
• The gunman fired at Thompson multiple times, striking his back and right calf before fleeing on foot.
• The NYPD released a new photo of the hooded suspect standing in front of the counter at the Starbucks at West 56th Street and 6th Avenue, just minutes from the Hilton hotel where he gunned down Thompson, 50. 
• Thompson was named CEO of UnitedHealth in April 2021. He joined the company in 2004. He was one of several senior executives at the company under investigation by the Department of Justice.
• Thompson’s wife, Paulette, said her husband had been getting threats before he was killed.
• The NYPD is investigating a possible message — which appears to include the words “deny,” “depose” and “defend” — written on live rounds and shell casings left behind by the masked assassin.
• A person of interest has been nabbed by police officers inside a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa.

• “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 Mangione.

  “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.’’

• Mangione was valedictorian of his 2016 high school graduating class at the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he played soccer, according to online sites. High school tuition at the all-boys school is nearly $40,000 a year.

  He said at the time of graduation that he planned to seek a degree in artificial intelligence, focused on the areas of computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, according to an interview with the Baltimore Fishbowl.