A man suspected to be the one that killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was held for questioning Monday in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was found with a gun and silencer similar to the ones used in the attack. The man was arrested based on weapons charges around said gun, with the weapon being an untraceable home assembled “ghost gun,” according to local law enforcement. He was also found with several fake IDs.
A law enforcement official interviewed by the Associated Press said that the man that they brought in for questioning had a 2-page document insulting the healthcare industry. Along with the document, the man had a gun similar to the killer’s gun used in the shooting, according to the same official. NYPD’s Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said that the gun may have been 3D printed.
The shooter, 26-year-old Marylander Luigi Mangione, was apprehended in a Pennsylvania McDonalds a couple hundred miles west of New York City, after a tip to law enforcement from an employee seeing a resemblance between the suspect and pictures released by law enforcement. He has had no prior arrests in New York. The man was questioned, and is planned to be extradited to New York for a criminal trial for the killing. His last known address was in Honolulu.
The New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, had a news conference that afternoon addressing the development. He stated that they have a “strong person of interest” and they would be pursuing finding additional evidence to connect him to the charge. They believe Mangione acted alone, due to evidence in the document the suspect was holding. “These parasites had it coming,” violence was the answer, and “it had to be done,” Mangione stated in the document. He also stated he acted alone, and he funded his own actions.
The NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch also spoke at the conference, going over the process of the manhunt. “For just over five days, our NYPD investigators combed over thousands of hours of video, followed up on hundreds of tips, processed every bit of forensic evidence to tighten the net,” Tisch said. They used drones, K-9 units, and even sent scuba divers into Central Park’s ponds.
