A 2020 University of Pennsylvania graduate with a love for computer programming and gaming, the man was arrested Monday morning as a person of interest in the ongoing murder investigation of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO.
The New York Police Chief of Detectives identified 26-year-old Luigi Nicholas Mangione as a suspect in the murder of 50-year-old United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson during a press conference on Monday morning. According to NYPD officer Joseph Kenny, Mangione was raised in Maryland and has ties to Honolulu, Hawaii, and San Francisco.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in May 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics.
According to a post from The Daily Pennsylvanian, Mangione assisted in founding the university’s UPGRADE game production club in 2016, which focuses on job skills and artistic expression for aspiring video game producers.
The university’s engineering website indicates that the game club is still in operation.
According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, a piece that included multiple quotations from Mangione and the UPGRADE club was taken down from the Penn Today website following the press conference on Monday, raising concerns about its content.
By enabling anyone who is interested to join the organization without submitting an application, Mangione hoped to move UPGRADE away from a competitive framework.
We talked about whether an application would make us appear more authentic, but that’s not the setting we’re aiming for. At the time, he told the Daily Pennsylvania, “We want to have fun and learn.” You can become a game developer if you’re willing to put in the work.
For his achievements in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Mangione was inducted into Penn’s Eta Kappa Nu honor society in 2018.
According to a CBS News report, he was a data engineer at the car-buying website TrueCar, according to his LinkedIn profile. However, a representative for the corporation stated that Mangione has not been employed there since 2023, as reported by CBS News.
Tolly Taylor of WBAL-TV 11 Baltimore reports that Mangione’s family owns Hayfields Country Club and other companies in the Baltimore region.
As Thompson walked alone from a nearby hotel to the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan on December 4, he was assassinated outside the hotel in what authorities described as a blatant, deliberate attack.
Despite wearing a mask throughout the shooting, the gunman left behind a trail of evidence, including a backpack he abandoned in Central Park, a smartphone discovered in a public plaza, and the wrapper for a protein bar and water bottle that police claim he purchased at Starbucks just before the assault.
After authorities received a tip that Mangione was dining at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, he was brought into jail Monday morning.
According to the New York Times, detectives claimed that he produced a phony New Jersey ID that was identical to the one the alleged shooter used to check into a hostel in New York City over a week prior to the murder.
According to the New York Times, he also possessed a handwritten manifesto that attacked health care organizations and their policies, as well as a pistol with a silencer.
According to Kenny, Mangionewas now being detained in Pennsylvania on gun-related charges and will soon be extradited to New York to face charges related to Thompson’s death.
Healthcare CEO shooting
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