The Search Ends

For five days, the man who killed a health insurance C.E.O. on a Manhattan street seemed to have vanished. But yesterday morning, a McDonald’s employee in Altoona, Pa., noticed a familiar-looking young man eating a meal and called the police.

Two officers arrived and asked the man if he had been to New York recently. He became quiet, the officers said, and started to shake.

The man, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, appeared to be the one they had been searching for, the police said. In his backpack, he had a gun, a silencer and a manifesto that, officials told The Times, derided health care companies for putting profits above care. He was charged in Manhattan with murder.

The killing, and the dayslong search for the person responsible, brought together three political issues.

First, surveillance. The McDonald’s employee called the police after recognizing Mangione from images that the police released last week. The police were able to get those images — including one where the suspect appeared without a mask — by combing through hundreds of hours of camera footage from streets, a hostel and a taxicab.

Privacy rights activists have criticized these tools in the past. Some thought the police would feed the images into facial recognition technology to find the shooter. But the police credited distributing the photos with cracking this case: Asked about the most important element of the manhunt, the N.Y.P.D. chief of detectives Joseph Kenny said, “It would be the release of that photograph from the media.”