Police have arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old software developer, in connection with the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione, of Maryland, was detained at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania on Monday morning.
Mangione was taken into custody on local firearm charges, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters. He has not been charged in connection with the shooting but is “believed to be our person of interest,” Tisch said.
Police have been searching for Thompson’s killer for nearly a week, despite the shooting taking place in public outside a Manhattan hotel. The manhunt has thus far relied on just a few grainy images of a man whose face is largely obscured by a mask and hoodie. Investigators have reportedly been looking for more surveillance images of the suspect to load into facial recognition software.
Police were led to Mangione via a “combination of old-school detective work and new age technology,” Tisch said. “We deployed drones, K9 units, and scuba divers. We leveraged the domain awareness system, argos cameras, and conducted aviation canvases.”
Despite scant visual evidence, a McDonald’s employee recognized Mangione on Monday morning and called police, the New York Times reports. “He was just sitting there eating,” Joseph Kenny, the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, said at a press briefing Monday.
Mangione reportedly had a gun, a silencer, and four fake IDs in his possession. The gun appeared to be a 3D-printed “ghost gun,” Kenny told reporters. After being apprehended, Mangione showed police a fake New Jersey ID, Kenny said. The ID was the same one used to check into a hostel in Manhattan on November 24th, eight days before the shooting. Sources also tell the New York Post that he was carrying a “manifesto” criticizing the US healthcare industry.
Three bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting had “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” written on them in permanent marker, two police officials told the Associated Press last week. Police later clarified that one of the bullets had “delay” written on it, not “defend.” The words are reminiscent of Delay, Deny, Defend: What Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, the title of a 2010 book by Rutgers Law professor Jay M. Feinman.
The shooting’s apparent anti-insurance motivation has led to expressions of support across the political spectrum for the assailant. Online sleuths have identified several online profiles that appear to be linked to Mangione, including a Goodreads account on which he left a favorable review of Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto written by Ted Kaczynski.
