Insurance CEO shooting suspect charged with murder in New York

After UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was gunned down on a New York sidewalk, police searched for the masked gunman with dogs, drones and scuba divers. Officers used the city’s muscular surveillance system. Investigators analyzed DNA samples, fingerprints and internet addresses. Police went door to door looking for witnesses.

But when an arrest came five days later, it was a customer at a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania that noticed another patron who resembled the man in the oblique security-camera photos that New York police had publicized.

The FBI announced Friday night it was offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family, was arrested Monday in the killing of Brian Thompson, who headed one of the United States’ largest medical insurance companies.

He remained jailed in Pennsylvania, where he was initially charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm, forgery and providing false identification to police. By late evening, prosecutors in Manhattan had added a charge of murder, according to an online court docket. He is expected to be extradited to New York eventually.

Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after police arrived to find Mangione sitting at a table in the back of the restaurant, wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop, according to a Pennsylvania police criminal complaint.

He initially gave them a fake ID, but when an officer asked Mangione whether he’d been to New York recently, he “became quiet and started to shake,” the complaint says.

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a Manhattan news conference that Mangione was carrying a gun like the one used to kill Thompson and the same fake ID the shooter had used to check into a New York hostel, along with a passport and other fraudulent IDs.

NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Mangione also had a three-page, handwritten document that shows “some ill will toward corporate America.”

It also had a line that said, “I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

Pennsylvania prosecutor Peter Weeks said in court that Mangione was found with a passport and $10,000 in cash, $2,000 of it in foreign currency. Mangione disputed the amount.

Thompson, 50, was killed Wednesday as he walked alone to a midtown Manhattan hotel for an investor conference. Police quickly came to see the shooting as a targeted attack by a gunman who appeared to wait for Thompson, came up behind him and fired a 9 mm pistol.



(Photo Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections via AP)