The accused killer of a health insurance CEO will appear in a Pennsylvania court on Thursday for an extradition hearing after a New York grand jury indicted him on a slew of charges, including first degree murder and terrorism.
Luigi Mangione, 26, has been charged with first degree murder in furtherance of terrorism and two counts of second degree murder, one of them as an act of terrorism, USA Today reports.
“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said.
Mangione is charged with gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York street as he walked to his company’s annual investors’ conference in the early morning of December 4. Mangione then slipped away from police and out of the city, by foot, on a bike, in a cab, and then by train.
He was finally captured nearly a week later in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he’d gotten off a bus and was eating at a McDonald’s. An employee there recognized him from the multiple surveillance images New York police released and called 911. Mangione faces weapons and false ID charges in Pennsylvania. He was still carrying the ghost gun police believe he used in Thompson’s slaying.
Mangione, who is being held without bond in Pennsylavnia, initially said he would fight extradition to New York, but Bragg has since said there are indications he will waive that right. Thursday’s hearing is listed as a preliminary hearing on the Pennsylvania charges in a court docket, but The Blair County district attorney’s office said an extradition hearing would follow that hearing, CBS News reported.
Bragg said that his office will be ready whether or not Mangione waives his right to fight extradition.
New York Police Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said on Tuesday that Mangione’s mother told an FBI task force that New York police were part of that the shooting “might be something that she could see him doing.”
Mangione’s mother filed a missing person report for her son in San Francisco on November 18, a week before his arrival in New York which was a week before the shooting. After the shooting, a San Francisco police officer reported to his superiors that he thought the gunman could be their missing person, and San Francisco police passed that information to the FBI, who passed it on to New York police.
New York police initially claimed they didn’t hear about it in time to take action but later backtracked and said they were part of the FBI task force that spoke to the mother on December 7, the day before his arrest in Pennsylvania.
Media and law enforcement have reacted with shock at an outpouring of support online for Mangione as an online fundraiser for his defense topped $150,000. His New York attorney, former prosecutor Karen Friedman Agnifilo, has not commented on whether she will accept the funds, and his Pennsylvania attorney, Thomas Dickey, has said both that he would not and that he might.
Thompson was at the helm of the country’s largest health insurance company. He and other UHC executives were accused of fraud and insider trading in a lawsuit filed earlier this year by a firefighters pension fund in Minnesota, and the US Department of Justice is investigating the company for antitrust activities.
