The suspect police are questioning in the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is an Ivy League graduate software engineer from a prominent Baltimore family who appears to have favorably reviewed the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, on a book website.
Luigi Mangione, 26, was identified by New York police this morning as a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of Thompson last week.
This is what we know about him so far.
What is Luigi Mangione’s background?
Mangione has ties to at least three states – Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and Maryland – and has no history of arrests in New York City, police said.
The suspect is the grandson of Nicholas Mangione, a prominent Baltimore real estate developer, and his wife, Mary C Mangione, a philanthropist who died last year.
The Mangione family owns Lorien Health Systems, a nursing home chain in Maryland, and Luigi volunteered there in 2014, according to his LinkedIn page.
Where did Luigi Mangione go to school?
Mangione graduated from the prestigious Gilman School, an all-boys school that is known as one of Baltimore’s toniest private schools and was the high school valedictorian in 2016.
In his valedictorian speech, Mangione lauded his classmates for “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world,” citing successful fundraisers and accomplishments in sports and academics.
“To the class of 2016, a kind of class that only comes around once every 50 years, it’s been an incredible journey and I simply can’t imagine the last few years with any other group of guys,” he said.
Mangione attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 2020 with a master’s and bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics, a university spokesperson told CNN. Mangione was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, social media photos show.
In an interview for a university blog post, Mangione talked about how he had started a video game development club.
“In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” Mangione said.
“In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I learned [on my own] how to program, and that’s why I’m a computer science major now; that’s how I got into it… I just really wanted to make games.”
What was Luigi Mangione’s job?
After graduating, Mangione worked as a software engineer for the online car sales company TrueCar, according to his LinkedIn page.
His most recent address was in Hawaii, NYPD officials said.
Mangione is registered to vote at his family’s address in Cockeysville, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb, and is registered as unaffiliated with a political party, according to the state’s voter registration lookup website.
He is the cousin of Maryland State Delegate Nino Mangione, a Republican, the state lawmaker’s office confirmed to local media.
Private security guards were blocking access to the family’s house on a golf club Monday afternoon local time (Tuesday morning AEDT).
What was Mangione carrying when he was arrested?
Police said that when officers detained Mangione, he was carrying a multipage document that expressed “ill will toward corporate America.”
The document stated “these parasites had it coming,” and “I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” a police official told CNN.
It also said that Mangione acted alone and that the attack was self-funded.
The shooting has captivated the nation after a man gunned down Thompson on Wednesday morning outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
Until identifying Mangione Monday afternoon, police had only released a handful of surveillance video screenshots of the man they believed was the shooter.
What do we know about Luigi Mangione’s digital footprint?
A Goodreads profile that appears to belong to Mangione shows that earlier this year, he reported having read the 1995 antitechnology manifesto written by the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, the infamous domestic terrorist and mathematician known for sending deadly bombs through the mail.
“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” Mangione wrote in a review of the book in January.
“He was a violent individual – rightfully imprisoned – who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterised as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
In his review, Mangione also shared thoughts someone else had shared about Kaczynski in a Reddit thread, quoting a commenter who had described his acts as “war and revolution,” saying that he “had the balls to recognise that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere” and that “‘Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
In total, Mangione’s Goodreads profile listed him as reading or wanting to read nearly 300 books, including a book about mental illness, a biography of the creator of the atomic bomb and Michael Pollan’s popular book on the science of psychedelics.
Also on Goodreads, he reported reading or wanting to read a number of books about coping with chronic back pain. An account on the social media platform X that appears to belong to him features a background profile photo of what looks like an X-ray image of a spine with hardware from a surgery.
Posts addressed to the X account suggest that some of Mangione’s friends have been trying to get in touch with him since earlier this year.
In July, one user tweeted at Mangione, “I haven’t heard from you in months,” urging him to respond to his wedding invitation. Three months later, another user posted, “Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.”
