Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate suspected in the brazen Manhattan killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was arrested and charged with murder Monday after a McDonald’s customer in Altoona, Pennsylvania recognized him from surveillance photos.
Mangione was sitting in the rear of the McDonald’s wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop computer when police approached him, the Associated Press reports, and when one of the officers asked if he’d been to New York recently, he “became quiet and started to shake,” according to a criminal complaint based on their accounts of the arrest.
Police officers found a gun, mask and writings linking him to the ambush.
He was found with a handwritten manifesto that spoke to his “motivation and mind-set,” said Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the New York City police, the New York Times reports. The manifesto contained the passages “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” according to a senior law enforcement official who saw it.
Police say the black pistol they found in the backpack of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old arrested in connection with the killing of a health-care executive, was a ghost gun: a weapon typically assembled by its owner at home, the Washington Post reports.
Investigators have increasingly linked ghost guns to crimes in recent years, and they have been the target of regulation efforts by state and federal officials.
Mangione — at least the online version of him — was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies, the Times reports.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University. In a graduation speech, he described his class as “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it.”
He was in regular contact with friends and family until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering from a painful back injury, friends said, and then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends.
Mangione was social, friendly and never particularly political, a high-school friend recalled. He was ambitious and carried his long interest in computer science toward college.
But his trail on the internet hinted at pain both physical and philosophical. In January, Mangione left a review of a book containing the rambling manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, on GoodReads, a social media site for bookworms.
“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,” Mangione wrote of the document. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
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