Valedictorian at his $37,000-a-year all-boys prep school. Founder of a gaming club and graduate at an Ivy League university. A rapidly ascending data engineer at TrueCar Inc.
Luigi Nicholas Mangione was all that. And now, he is also the suspect in the coldblooded killing of insurance executive Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two gunned down last week in Midtown Manhattan.
To some, Mangione — if he is indeed the killer — represents a folk hero acting on the collective rage of a nation against the perceived faults of the insurance industry. Others see him as the face of a country where law and order has broken down, morality has collapsed and company executives are scapegoated with deadly consequences for systemic inequities.
Mangione, 26, was arrested by the police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday after authorities were alerted to a “suspicious male” who looked like the person wanted for the shooting of the UnitedHealth Group Inc executive December 4.
He was found with a homemade gun and a manifesto, which a person familiar with the matter described as anti-capitalist and critical of health-care companies’ profit motives. It said he acted alone and was self-funded, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential matters and declined to elaborate.
Mangione appeared in court in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, for a preliminary arraignment for charges on five counts, including forgery, carrying a gun without a license and showing law enforcement false identification, according to a criminal complaint released by the state court system. Details on a lawyer for Mangione weren’t immediately available.
A survey of his online presence shows Mangione — who attended the University of Pennsylvania — praised the manifesto of another Ivy League graduate known for violent acts aimed at corporate targets, the Unabomber, calling his insights “prescient” on the book-review website Goodreads.
By all accounts, Mangione appears to have had a privileged upbringing in Maryland, the product of a wealthy family with various business interests. His mother is a travel agent, and he had ties across the country and the world, most recently living in Honolulu.
He attended the prestigious Gilman School in Baltimore and graduated as valedictorian in 2016. In his valedictory address, Mangione highlighted his classmates’ innovative spirit.
“Having great ideas, however, isn’t enough,” he said. “The class of 2016’s inventiveness also stems from its incredible courage to explore the unknown and try new things.”
At the University of Pennsylvania, he earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering, computer and information science in 2020. He also founded the university’s first video-game development club. “Our goal is to have fun and learn,” Mangione told The Daily Pennsylvanian.
The summer before he graduated, he worked as the head counselor and an artificial intelligence teaching assistant at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, designing lesson plans and teaching high school students. The work involved supervising more than three dozen students, according to his LinkedIn account. He helped create an “inclusive, fun, and stimulating” community among the residential staff, he wrote.
He began working as a data engineer at TrueCar in November 2020, and garnered his first promotion less than a year later. By October 2022, he was a data engineer III, working across more than a dozen technologies on lease and loan payments, pricing data sources and performance tracking. (His employment with TrueCar ended in 2023, the company said. It declined to provide any additional information.)
Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald’s restaurant after an employee reported a resemblance to the suspect in the nationwide manhunt. He had what appeared to be a ghost gun, made using a 3D printer to circumvent any paperwork or legal details involved in purchasing a firearm. It fired the same type of bullet that killed Thompson, though ballistics testing was still pending, said Joseph Kenny, the chief of New York Police Department detectives.
Mangione’s social media posting provided some insight into his life. He left reviews of Surfbreak and the Hub on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, praising the “community of travelers and entrepreneurs” at Surfbreak, a co-living space, and said the Hub, a co-working site, was a “warm, energizing place.”
“Both memberships have enabled me to meet so many interesting people, and the combination of the two has provided the perfect balance of work and life,” according to the review he posted as @luig.man.
Fun and enjoyment were paramount for Mangione, from his days at Stanford, to the video-game club he founded at Penn, to his living situation in Hawaii. But then, seemingly, things may have changed.
On Goodreads, Mangione posted a positive review in June 2021 of Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematician and Harvard University graduate who became a domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.
It would be easy to write it off “as the manifesto of a lunatic,” in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies, Mangione wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
“He was a violent individual — rightfully imprisoned — who maimed innocent people,” Mangione wrote. “While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
Traffic on social media accounts seemed to indicate that family members were trying to locate Mangione as recently as two weeks ago, though it wasn’t possible to verify the accuracy of the posts which have since been taken down by X. Others speculated about a possible surfing accident and unsuccessful back surgery, which also went unconfirmed.
The Goodreads account in his name lists at least five books about chronic back pain and fitness, and his X account banner features an X-ray image of a lower back with spinal screws that are often inserted during surgery.
Such operations are notoriously difficult and often ineffective. They can also be hard to get in some instances, as some studies show the pain may ease with time and insurance companies crack down on the use of procedures and medications that can come with serious complications.
Patients are increasingly frustrated with the role that insurers play as gatekeepers for certain types of medical procedures, according to Wendell Potter, a former Cigna Group communications executive who has written books that are critical of the industry. Some become especially distressed as they wait for approval of treatment for conditions that can cause extreme pain and loss of work, Potter said.
“One of the biggest reasons that people have to access the health-care system is because of back and joint pain,” he said. “It can be expensive, and there are a lot of surgeries that are either delayed for one reason or another that should have taken place, or that have been approved and that weren’t necessary.”
While the effectiveness of surgery for back pain is somewhat controversial, “the insurance companies put themselves in the position of being the decision-maker here, and that may not be an appropriate role for them,” he said. “You often have someone at an insurance company making a determination that runs contrary to what a patient’s doctor says a patient needs.”
Social media on Monday evening was full of praise for Mangione, with Luigi the top trending topic on X and FREE HIM coming in at No. 7. #FreeLuigi gained traction on Instagram. The McDonald’s in Altoona, where Mangione was caught, also was hit by one-star reviews after the arrest, with one poster criticizing the “class traitor” who turned him in and another calling him “one of the brightest minds of our generation.”
