The 26-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson experienced years of health problems related to his back, which ultimately led him to undergo surgery in 2023, according to posts that he appears to have written on Reddit.
After reviewing the posts on social media, New York Police Department detectives are now investigating the possibility that an insurance claim might have motivated alleged shooter Luigi Mangione.
“We’re looking into whether or not the insurance industry either denied a claim from him or didn’t help him out to the fullest extent,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Tuesday.
Thomas Dickey, Mangione’s attorney, did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, but he told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that he hasn’t “seen any evidence” connecting Mangione to the killing.
“I don’t want people to jump to these prejudgment things because nobody would ever want that if they were accused, or one of their loved ones were accused,” Dickey said.
On Reddit, Mangione appears to have actively posted in a subreddit on spondylolisthesis, a condition in which a vertebra slips out of alignment, using the account u/Mister_Cactus. That account has been suspended since Mangione’s arrest, but HuffPost reviewed its activity under a program that archives activities of banned accounts.
The account also posted on a tech-based subreddit with links to Mangione’s GitHub account, where he shared open-source projects he was working on as a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
In various posts apparently written by Mangione, he says that he’d always had some back pain, but it became serious when he was 23. After “conservative treatment,” things became dire in the summer of 2022 when he injured himself. One post describes experiencing bladder and genital pain on and off for a year, as well as sciatica and back pain.
R.J. Martin, the founder of the co-living community Surfbreak in Hawaii where Mangione lived for six months in 2022, told The New York Times that a surfing lesson had left Mangione in debilitating pain.
“He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,” Martin told the Times.
Another Reddit post apparently written by Mangione describes having L5-S1 fusion surgery in July 2023. A photo on his now-deleted X account showed metal screws in his spine.
Subsequent Reddit posts suggest Mangione was upbeat about the procedure in the months after the surgery.
“The surgery wasn’t nearly as scary as I made it out to be in my head, and I knew it was the right decision within a week, and that I won’t have to bother with injections or future surgery for many years,” one October 2023 Reddit post read. “Remember that the human body is supposed to exist in a pain-free state. Constant pain means something is wrong. Even with metal in my back, I’m not in pain.”
Mangione appeared to offer advice and condolences to other users experiencing similar issues.
“If your back is broken and it’s unlivable, age has nothing to do with it,” read a post in April. “Good surgeons understand this and will operate on you based on your symptoms + anatomy.”
Another post advised a fellow Reddit user seeking surgery: “Tell them you are ‘unable to work.’”
“We live in a capitalist society. I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life,” the post read.
The posts stopped in May, and according to Mangione’s friends and family, he began to withdraw over the next few months. In a missing persons report to San Francisco police first reported by the San Francisco Standard, Mangione’s mother said she last spoke to her son in July. A now-deleted post on X from a friend in July begged Mangione to get in touch.
As of Aug. 31, Mangione was no longer living in the Hawaii apartment he’d rented for two years, KHON2 reported. It’s unclear where he was until Nov. 24, when police say he arrived in New York City via a Greyhound bus. On Dec. 4, he allegedly left the hostel where he’d been staying before dawn, then shot Thompson as the executive arrived at the annual investor conference for UnitedHealth Group.
Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday. Authorities said he was carrying a ghost gun, a suppressor, thousands of dollars of cash, fake IDs and a manifesto.
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The three-page handwritten document reportedly critiques the U.S. health care system without going into detail about any specific grievance Mangione may have had.
“Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” the document reportedly says.
