Luigi Mangione ‘had so much to offer’ — now, he is a murder suspect

BALTIMORE - Luigi Mangione was a young prince of this city, his family’s name emblazoned on the walls of buildings and civic institutions. Teachers at his elite prep school described him as a student leader, on his way to an Ivy League education. Classmates called the valedictorian, athlete and budding engineer an inspiration, someone focused on society’s future. More accolades followed at college in Philadelphia.

Then came worsening back pain, time abroad and a period of discontent. Friends said they lost track of the 26-year-old this year, struggling to confirm his participation in a wedding; his mother filed a missing-person report.

As Mangione’s once-charmed life seemed to be crumbling, Brian Thompson’s fortunes appeared to be climbing. The 50-year-old executive, from a small town in Iowa, was entering his fourth year as CEO of the nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealthcare, where he was well-liked by employees and respected in the industry - even as some patients complained about the company’s practice of denying care.

“I feel really good,” Thompson told investors on a January call. “Very optimistic about UnitedHealthcare … a lot to look forward to here in the year.”

The two men’s paths collided on a Manhattan sidewalk early the morning of Dec. 4, according to police charging documents, with Mangione accused of standing in wait for Thompson in what authorities are calling a targeted shooting. Police who arrested Mangione on Monday in Pennsylvania found a handwritten manifesto that blamed “parasites” and that reportedly railed against UnitedHealth Group - the parent organization of UnitedHealthcare and the nation’s largest health-care company.

Mangione appeared in court Tuesday as prosecutors sought to extradite him to New York to face five charges, including second-degree murder, in connection with Thompson’s death. Separately, he faces five counts in Pennsylvania, including presenting false identification to the police officers who arrested him. Ahead of Tuesday’s court hearing, Mangione appeared to struggle with officers and seemed to shout toward a throng of journalists about “an insult to the intelligence of the American people.”

Mangione was denied bail. The extradition process to New York, which he is fighting, could take weeks.

The developments have staggered people who watched Mangione’s early rise and are trying to reconcile the promising high school and college student with the man now sitting in a Pennsylvania prison cell. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being publicly linked to Mangione or the shooting of Thompson.

“That’s not the boy I know,” said one of Mangione’s former teachers at Gilman School, the all-boys private school in Baltimore where Mangione was the top graduate in 2016. Other teachers and students at Gilman discussed his humility, kindness and affability; classmates from the University of Pennsylvania similarly described a well-liked engineering student and fraternity brother who graduated from the school in 2020.

What radicalized Mangione and fixated him on the health insurance industry is not fully known, though clues exist in his personal health history and in a trail he appears to have left online. Friends said Mangione struggled with years-long back problems, worsening his quality of life; he moved to Hawaii after college in pursuit of getting healthy. An X-ray he posted on social media appears to depict a person suffering from spondylolisthesis, a spinal condition in which a vertebra slips out of place and can cause chronic pain, physicians said.

“When my spondy went bad on me last year (23M), it was completely devastating as a young athletic person,” read a post left by a Reddit account that had previously linked to Mangione’s personal programming site and offered personal details that match Mangione’s. Reddit declined to confirm whether the account, which was deactivated this week, belonged to Mangione.

Friends said the pain hampered Mangione’s social life and culminated in major surgery last year. The X-ray posted by Mangione shows a “lumbar spine with posterior spinal instrumentation, possible fusion” - a procedure that involves screws or rods to stabilize the spine, said Zeeshan Sardar, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Columbia University Medical Center who reviewed the post at the request of The Washington Post. While patients are warned that spinal surgeries may worsen a person’s condition, the Reddit account linked to Mangione last year described the surgery as a success.

Mangione also was long focused on what he saw as societal decay, posting commentary online that sometimes summarized his reading, including on the popular review website Goodreads.

In his 2021 review of the Unabomber’s manifesto - written by an anonymous killer terrorizing the United States from the 1970s into the 1990s with meticulously crafted pipe bombs - Mangione awarded it four stars and shared a comment he attributed to another person: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”

Selections he made for a book club he started in Hawaii in 2023 began to alarm others, said Sarah Nehemiah, a 27-year-old producer and researcher who met Mangione the prior year and moved into his co-living space after Mangione had left.

“Several members left due to discomfort in his book choices,” she said. “The Unabomber manifesto is what really pushed people over the edge.”

Investigators are trying to piece together what led Mangione to allegedly fixate on Thompson. UnitedHealthcare, which provides coverage to roughly 1 in 7 Americans, declined to comment on whether Mangione or his family were customers of the health insurance company.

UnitedHealth Group has been the focus of congressional oversight, watchdog groups and patient complaints that say the sprawling company’s subsidiaries have wrongly denied patients’ claims, sometimes by using artificial intelligence. The company and its largest subsidiary, UnitedHealthcare, have become proxies for many Americans’ broader complaints about health care, a phenomenon crystallized by the outpouring of complaints and mockery since Thompson’s shooting.

UnitedHealth Group has defended its practices.

In Baltimore on Tuesday, as fog blanketed the city, residents said they were still wrestling with the revelation that Thompson’s alleged killer is a member of the well-respected Mangione family, which is prominent in the region and has long-standing ties to Little Italy, the neighborhood just east of the Inner Harbor. The family owns Lorien Health Systems, a network of skilled nursing and assisted-living facilities, where Luigi Mangione volunteered in high school, and has founded or acquired golf and country clubs that attract top local players. A Baltimore art museum, university and a now-defunct opera company have been among the civic institutions that have benefited from Mangione philanthropy.

Greater Baltimore Medical Center, a hospital long affiliated with the Mangione family, boasts a “Mangione Family Center” in the soaring atrium where obstetrics patients enter the building; a placard in another part of the hospital thanks the Mangione Family Foundation for donating more than $1 million.

“You would not truly think that a member of the Mangione family would be accused of this,” said Thomas J. Maronick Jr., a criminal-defense attorney in Maryland who knows several of the suspect’s relatives.

The family released a statement Monday night saying they were “shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest.”

“We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved. We are devastated by this news,” the Mangione family said in its statement.

A star student and engineer

The Luigi Mangione whom teachers saw growing up was a builder. A video posted by Gilman in 2016 shows him at the center of a robotics competition, manipulating a robot and helping lead the school’s team to success in a tournament.

The prep school charges nearly $38,000 for a year of high school tuition, according to its website, and many students come from some degree of wealth. But far from bragging about his family’s local prominence, Mangione was viewed as self-effacing and accessible - a volunteer who coached other students on their essays in the school’s writing center.

Then came Penn, the Ivy League university, where again Mangione found himself in leadership roles, such as helping to found a video game development club. A Penn-affiliated news outlet in December 2018 reported that the club had grown to 60 members.

“Passion is what we’re looking for,” Mangione said in an interview, adding that the club didn’t turn away people who lacked programming experience.

Mangione graduated from Penn with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four years. He went to work as an engineer for TrueCar, a web platform for people to shop for automobiles. The company, which instituted broad layoffs in 2023, has said Mangione has not been employed by it since that year.

Mangione spent early 2022 at Surfbreak HNL, a shared living space tucked along Oahu’s south shore and about a mile from Waikiki Beach, a former resident told The Post.

Mangione arrived in January 2022 and left by mid-April, said Nehemiah, who has remained close with other residents, some of whom were hesitant to speak publicly about their interactions with Mangione but authorized her to speak on their behalf.

Surfbreak, which sits on the 40th floor of a Honolulu high-rise, boasts floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the water and bills itself as the “the first co-living and co-working penthouse for remote workers in Hawaii” on its website. Monthly rent for a twin bedroom starts at $1,605, while “king corner” rooms command up to $3,305, according to the Surfbreak website.

Nehemiah and her friends at Surfbreak believed Mangione had left “due to a lifelong back injury that was exacerbated by surfing and hiking,” she told The Post. “To our knowledge, nearly all members of Surfbreak from his tenure lost contact with him after he left.”

Posts circulating on social media and conversations with those who knew him indicate Mangione withdrew and dropped out of touch with friends this year.

In since-deleted posts this July on X, one person tagged an account that appears to be Mangione’s and said he hadn’t heard from Mangione in months.

“Hey man I need you to call me … (You) made commitments to me for my wedding and if you can’t honor them I need to know so I can plan accordingly,” the person wrote.

In another post from the same account, posted in November, just two weeks before Mangione was taken into custody, the person wrote: “Thinking of you and prayers every day in your name. Know you are missed and loved.”

It appears that Mangione spent time in Japan this year. In a post Monday on X, Japanese professional poker player Jun Obara recounted a chance encounter with him in a Tokyo restaurant after a photo of them posted to the platform in February circulated online.

Former classmates said they couldn’t square this new, darker portrait of Mangione with the person who was once so optimistic.

“I can’t help but feel sorry for Luigi and really the American people - that he had so much to offer, to innovate and create for the world and wound up so damaged that he did the unthinkable instead,” said a former Gilman student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “As I knew him, he was a creator, not a taker of life.”

On social media, Mangione in 2022 posted excerpts from a speech he delivered to high school classmates - part of a tradition in which Gilman seniors have long been allowed to deliver a speech to the assembled high school on any topic of their choosing.

Mangione chose to discuss the arc of human progress, warning that the audience might think he was “crazy.”

“We may have been born into one of the most exciting times on earth,” Mangione said in his prepared remarks, talking about the arrival of artificial intelligence and other technological breakthroughs that could even lead to immortality. “We might not recognize it in our day-to-day lives, but the world is changing fast.”

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George reported from Washington and Gowen from Lawrence, Kansas. Daniel Gilbert and Aaron Schaffer in Washington, Peter Hermann in Baltimore, and Amy Schafer in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.