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The suspect, Luigi Mangione, was an Ivy League tech graduate from a prominent Maryland family who in recent months had suffered physical and psychic pain.
Dec. 9, 2024Updated 10:09 p.m. ET
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing, and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Mr. Mangione, who faces a variety of charges related to the gun and fake ID, has not been charged in connection with the killing. But the authorities have said that he is a “person of interest” in the killing, and in the hours since his apprehension his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect has begun to come into focus.
Mr. Mangione was in regular contact with friends and family until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering the effects of a painful back injury, friends said, but then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends: Had anyone heard from him?
