The writings 26-year-old Luigi Mangione allegedly had on him when he was arrested as the prime suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson do not refer to his alleged victim by name or even as an individual person connected to a particular company.
“These parasites had it coming,” Mangione is said to have written.
Note the plural. Also note that when he was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning, Mangione allegedly also possessed what police believe was the ghost gun likely used to kill Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk last week.
“You have to ask the question: Was this, is this the only one that he had planned?” Mary Ellen O’Toole, who was among the most senior profilers for the FBI before she retired in 2009 and became director of the forensic science program at George Mason University, told the Daily Beast before the arrest.
After she had heard reports of Mangione’s arrest, along with the gun, the writings and more information on the suspect, including the fact that he was an Ivy League graduate with a masters degree, O’Toole said, “He talks about parasites. He doesn’t talk about the single victim. So he objectifies people. And he didn’t go home. He had to know the severity of what he was doing, and that there was no way after what happened in New York, he could never return to his normal life. And he is smart enough to have known that.”
She observed that after the shooting, he had appeared to remain “a kind of a wanderer” until his capture.
“All that tells me there could have been other victims that he intended to target,” she concluded.
It is possible that some other health insurance executive owes his or her life to a young woman working at the Upper Manhattan hostel where the suspect stayed before the shooting. She had flirted with him and asked him to raise his mask, thereby, inadvertently—but no less critically—allowing the surveillance camera to get a full enough view of his face that a woman working in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s recognized him and called 911. The photo also enabled the two police officers who responded to immediately decide he was indeed the subject of the nationwide manhunt.
“We just didn’t even think twice about it. We knew that was our guy,” said Officer Tyler Frye, who has only been on the job for six months. Some misguided folks denounced the two women online as “snitches,” apparently imagining that Mangione is a hero of some kind. A good number of people seemed to assume that he was among the many of us who have been treated callously by health insurance companies.
Mangione did post online a scan from an apparent back operation he underwent following years of living with a misaligned vertebra that would pinch a nerve, causing him agonizing pain and limiting his physical activities.
However, a top surgeon who viewed the scan and offered an opinion on background at the request of the Daily Beast reported that it “surgically looks pretty straightforward” and was a “pretty standard surgical procedure.” The surgeon added: “The x-ray is oblique and just one view so hard to say much about it but no obvious problems.”
For reasons that may or may not be related to the surgery, Mangione is said by a friend to have gone “radio silent” last summer. His family owns a string of nursing homes along with a country club and certainly could have arranged for rehab if his health insurance company was reluctant to provide it, as is sometimes the case.
It is worth noting that surveillance videos show that the gunman, in footage of what has become known as the “CEO killing,” had no apparent trouble fleeing the scene or hopping onto an e-bike as might be expected of somebody suffering serious trouble after back surgery. He certainly did not move like he was being driven mad by pain. And a video of him being perp-walked after his arrest shows Mangione emerging from a police vehicle and continuing on into the jail without any obvious difficulty.
At a press conference after the arrest, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said it “has been deeply disturbing as some have looked to celebrate instead of condemning this killer. Brian Thompson was a father to two. He was a husband and he was a friend to many, and yes, he was the CEO of a health insurance company in America.”
Shapiro went on with an eloquence and emotional clarity that made you lament he was not a choice on the last presidential ballot, and hope that he may be on the next one.
“We do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” he said. “I understand people have real frustration with our health-care system, and I have worked to address that throughout my career.”
He went on, “In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice. In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this: He is no hero. The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 at McDonald’s this morning. The real heroes every day in our society are the women and men who put on uniforms like these and go out in our communities to keep us safe. This killer is not a hero. He should not be hailed.”
Shapiro did hail the young rookie cop who had started his career with what may well be his biggest arrest.
“I want to say a special thanks to Officer Tyler Fry of the Altoona Police Department,” Shapiro said. “He acted swiftly. He acted with smarts, and he acted with calm. You know, safety often turns on the strength of the relationship between the community and law.”
In this instance, the community and the law may have saved someone else from suffering vigilante violence masquerading as justice.
