2 weeks Ago
The suspect police are questioning in the slaying of the UnitedHealthcare CEO is an Ivy League graduate software engineer from a prominent Baltimore family who appears to have favorably reviewed the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, on a book website. Luigi Mangione, 26, was identified by New York police Monday as a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of CEO Brian Thompson last week. Mangione has ties to at least three states – Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and Maryland – and has no history of arrests in New York City, police said.
The suspect comes from a wealthy Baltimore family. His grandfather, Nicholas Mangione, a former masonry contractor who once told the Baltimore Sun he started working at age 11, built a local real estate empire that included nursing home facilities around Maryland and two country clubs in the Baltimore suburbs. The younger Mangione, who is one of more than 30 grandchildren of Nicholas Mangione and his wife Mary, volunteered at a family businesses, the nursing home chain Lorien Health Systems, while he was in high school, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Mangione graduated from the prestigious Gilman School, an all-boys institution that is known as one of Baltimore’s toniest private schools, where he was the high school valedictorian in 2016. In his valedictorian speech, Mangione lauded his classmates for “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world,” citing successful fundraisers and accomplishments in sports and academics. “To the class of 2016, a kind of class that only comes around once every 50 years, it’s been an incredible journey and I simply can’t imagine the last few years with any other group of guys,” he said.
Mangione attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 2020 with a master’s and bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics, a university spokesperson told CNN. Mangione was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, social media photos show. In an interview for a university blog post, Mangione talked about how he had started a video game development club.
“In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” Mangione said. “In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I learned [on my own] how to program, and that’s why I’m a computer science major now; that’s how I got into it..
. I just really wanted to make games.” After graduating, Mangione worked as a software engineer for the online car sales company TrueCar, according to his LinkedIn page.
His most recent address was in Hawaii, NYPD officials said. Mangione is registered to vote at his family’s address in Cockeysville, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb, and is registered as unaffiliated with a political party, according to the state’s voter registration lookup website. He is the cousin of Maryland State Delegate Nino Mangione, a Republican, the state lawmaker’s office confirmed to local media.
The Mangione family also run a family foundation that has nearly $4.5 million in assets, and were longtime benefactors of Loyola University in Maryland, which named its aquatic center after them. Private security guards were blocking access to the family’s house on a golf club Monday afternoon.
Police said Monday that when officers detained Mangione, he was carrying a multipage document that expressed “ill will toward corporate America.” The document stated “these parasites had it coming,” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” a police official told CNN. It also said that Mangione acted alone and that the attack was self-funded.
The shooting has captivated the nation after a man gunned down Thompson on Wednesday morning outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel. Until identifying Mangione Monday afternoon, police had only released a handful of surveillance video screenshots of the man they believed was the shooter. A Goodreads profile that appears to belong to Mangione shows that earlier this year, he reported having read the 1995 antitechnology manifesto written by the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, the infamous domestic terrorist and mathematician known for sending deadly bombs through the mail.
“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” Mangione wrote in a review of the book in January. “He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people.
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.” In his review, Mangione also shared thoughts someone else had shared about Kaczynski in a Reddit thread, quoting a commenter who had described his acts as “war and revolution,” saying that he “had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere” and that “‘Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.” In total, Mangione’s Goodreads profile listed him as reading or wanting to read nearly 300 books, including a book about mental illness, a biography of the creator of the atomic bomb and Michael Pollan’s popular book on the science of psychedelics.
Also on Goodreads, he reported reading or wanting to read a number of books about coping with chronic back pain. An account on the social media platform X that appears to belong to him features a background profile photo of what looks like an X-ray image of a spine with hardware from a surgery. Handwritten notes laying out a workout routine that Mangione posted on what appears to be his Google Drive account state that he was suffering from spondylolisthesis, the slippage of a vertebrae in the spine.
It’s not clear whether Mangione received any treatment for the condition. On X, Mangione posted and shared posts about science and technology, including artificial intelligence and psychedelics. The roughly 75 accounts he followed included prominent academics and public figures such as Joe Rogan, Edward Snowden, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. and the best-selling author of The Anxious Generation, a book about the negative effects of social media on American teens. Posts addressed to the X account suggest that some of Mangione’s friends have been trying to get in touch with him since earlier this year.
In July, one user posted at Mangione, “I haven’t heard from you in months,” urging him to respond to his wedding invitation. Three months later, another user posted, “Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.” CNN’s Daniel A.
Medina, Rob Kuznia and Scott Glover contributed to this report. Editor’s Note: This story was updated to include additional information about Mangione..
