Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has mentioned that Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of CEO, could potentially encounter more charges as investigations continue into the murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief.
Bragg told WABC his office charged Mangione with second degree murder because he wanted to bring charges quickly.
“Murder 2 is the intentional killing of a person, punishable by 25 years to life under New York law,” Bragg said Wednesday. “Murder 1 has a number of delineated circumstances, including, for example, a serial murder, murder of a witness, murder of a police officer.”
Prosecutors will be exploring those circumstances to see if they fit the shooting death of the 50-year-old executive, shot dead on December 4 as he walked from his hotel to the New York Midtown Hilton for his company’s annual investors’ conference.
In a spiral notebook found when Mangione was arrested on Monday in Pennsylvania, the accused gunman wrote that he’d considered using a bomb but determined that it would be better to “wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention.”
“It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” he wrote.
Although investigators have declined to be specific about a motive for the brazen shooting, Mangione’s writings in the notebook and a 2-page “manifesto” make clear he was angry about the private US health insurance system, correctly noting that healthcare in the United States is the most expensive in the world and that US Healthcare in particular is the among the country’s largest corporations, as CrimeOnline reported.
Mangione slipped out of New York City after the brazen sidewalk shooting of Thompson by e-bike, cab, and bus. Police launched a frantic search that included collecting dozens of images and videos from Mangione’s 10-day stay in the city prior to the shooting, as well as searches in Central Park that eventually turned up the backpack he was wearing at the time of the shooting. Investigators found a jacket and Monopoly money inside the pack.
Divers searched the lake in Central Park, apparently looking for the gun used in the shooting, but Mangione still had the gun on him when he was taken into custody in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he’d taken a bus from Philadelphia. After alternately describing saying the gun had a silencer, then that it was a modern version of a British World War II pistol without a silencer, and finally a pistol used to euthanize animals without a silencer, investigators learned that the gun was a 3D printed “ghost gun” with a suppressor.
Investigators say that shell casings found at the scene of the shooting match the gun in Mangione’s possession, WABC reports. They also said that Mangione’s fingerprints match those found on a water bottle and power bar dropped near the scene, although they’d previously said the fingerprints on the water bottle were too smudged to make an identification.
Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona after an employee of the fast food restaurant recognized him and called 911. He faces gun charges in Pennsylvania and was ordered held without bond earlier this week, and he is fighting extradition to New York, a tactic that rarely works and serves only to delay the process.
His Altoona attorney, Thomas Dickey, said he anticipates that Mangione will plead not guilty in New York as well and that he’d welcome the opportunity to represent him there, although he has not been admitted to the bar in New York. Dickey declined to say how he came to represent Mangione or who was paying him. Mangione initially requested a public defender.
Dickey, who is making the rounds of mainstream media, also spoke about offers of donations to his client’s defense.
“I just don’t feel comfortable about that,” he told CNN. “It just doesn’t sit right with me, really.”
He was even less clear when asked later by ABC News if he would accept donations. “I don’t know,” he said.
Mangione comes from a prominent family in Maryland, where his grandfather is a well-known real estate developer who owns, among other properties, healthcare clinics. He has a graduate degree in computer science and reportedly suffers from debilitating back pain, which may also play a part in the motive for the killing.
