This image provided by the New York City Police Department shows a man wanted for questioning in connection to the investigation of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024. (New York City Police Department via AP)

Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a Maryland native who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2020, made his first court appearance since being arrested Monday morning at an Altoona McDonald’s in connection with the brazen shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Dec. 4.

Mangione, 26, was ordered held without bail and did not enter a plea at the Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg, Pa. He faces five charges, including one felony count of forgery and one felony count of carrying a firearm without a license, according to the criminal complaint. Later Monday night he was charged in Manhattan with murder, as well as three gun charges and forgery. He is expected to be extradited to New York at some point.

It was a dizzying day of revelations that began in early afternoon, as word spread that there had been an arrest in connection with the dawn ambush of the CEO at an investor conference in Midtown New York.

In an evening press conference, Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro said Mangione had apparently been on a bus traveling between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and got off in Altoona, over 200 miles west of New York. Employees at the McDonald’s there recognized him from widely circulated images and called the police, who said Mangione acted suspiciously after he was stopped and was found to be carrying multiple false IDs, a 3D-printed ghost gun and suppressor similar to the one believed to have been used in the killing of Thompson, and a three-page, handwritten manifesto that officials said railed against the healthcare industry. One of the fake IDs found matches a fake New Jersey driver’s license used in New York to check into a hostel before the attack.

Gov. Shapiro thanked the individual who reported Mangione’s presence, saying they “acted as a hero.”

“In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero,” he said. “Hear me on this, he is no hero. The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 in the McDonald’s this morning.”

One of the fake IDs found matches a fake New Jersey driver’s license used in New York to check into a hostel before the attack. Thompson was shot outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel by someone who then slipped away and has been the subject of an intensive manhunt.  

New York City Mayor Eric Adams held a press conference confirming that Mangione was a person of interest in the shooting of Thompson. New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that a McDonald’s employee recognized Mangione and contacted the police. NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said that they believe the suspect acted alone. 

Prominent Baltimore family

Mangione is a native of Towson, Md., and member of a prominent Baltimore-area family. His grandfather is Nicholas Mangione, a Baltimore real estate developer, and one of his cousins is Nino Mangione, a Maryland state delegate. The suspect graduated from the Gilman School, a tony Baltimore all-boys’ high school, in 2016 as the valedictorian. Gilman Headmaster Henry P. A. Smyth called the news of Mangione’s arrest “deeply distressing” in an email to the school community Monday.

The New York Times reports that he spent time in Hawaii at a coworking space that served as home base for “digital nomads” in Honolulu. “Nothing strange,” Nam Vu, a co-founder of the coworking space, told the Times. “He was a nice guy.”

Mangione’s family released a statement Monday night through his cousin, Maryland House of Delegates member Nino Mangione.

Mangione’s time at Penn

Mangione went to the University of Pennsylvania, the school has confirmed to multiple outlets, graduating in May 2020 with a bachelor of science in engineering and a master’s in engineering. A Penn Today article, from December 2018, detailed how he co-founded UPGRADE, a student-run club that developed video games. He had posted photos taken at Phi Kappa Psi fraternity during his time at Penn.

A LinkedIn page with Mangione’s name and photo lists an internship with Firaxis Games in Baltimore, as well as teaching assistant positions at Penn and Stanford University. It also lists that he has worked for car pricing and retail site TrueCar for the past four years as a data engineer. TrueCar confirmed his employment, but told the Guardian he has not worked there since 2023

Internet sleuths have quickly turned many social media accounts that could be linked to Mangione, including a Goodreads account that has a review of a book by Unabomber Ted Kaczynnski, “Industrial Society and its Future.” His review is oddly sympathetic.

“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” it reads. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”

The account also lists two books about dealing with back pain, which is notable because an account on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) with Mangione’s information has an X-ray image of the lower back with four pins in it in the profile header. The New York Times reports that he had struggled with a debilitating back condition, and his family had been searching for him for most of this year after he had back surgery.

Josiah Ryan, a spokesperson for Surfbreak’s owner and founder R.J. Martin, told AP that Mangione left Surfbreak to get surgery on the mainland for severe back pain from his childhood, which interfered in several aspects of his life. Mangione returned to Honolulu and rented an apartment, losing touch with Martin between six months and a year ago.


Another book that has been linked to this attack is 2010’s “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It,” based on those words — “deny,” “defend” and “depose” — being written on the shell casings found at the scene of the attack on Thompson. The book is by Jay M. Feinman, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University. 

“What happened to Mr. Thompson was a tragedy,” Rutgers Law School told WHYY’s  P. Kenneth Burns in an emailed statement. “It is unfortunate that Emeritus Professor Feinman’s book exploring the need for major reform in the health care industry has been thrust into the spotlight under these circumstances.” (edited) 

The Times reports that Mangione has denied having an accomplice, though police are looking into who he might have stayed with in Philadelphia before setting out for Pittsburgh.

“To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” he reportedly wrote in his manifesto.

Nick Kariuki is Billy Penn’s trending news reporter. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Medill’s MSJ program at Northwestern University, Nick was previously a sportswriter for outlets such...