HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa. – The suspect charged with shooting to death a health insurance company chief executive on a Manhattan street will be taken Thursday morning to hearings on related Pennsylvania criminal charges and efforts to extradite him to New York.
The preliminary hearing on forgery and firearms charges and consideration of a fugitive from justice complaint against Luigi Mangione may not take long.
He is expected to waive extradition, clearing the way for his return to New York, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the case and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.
Court officials said Mangione will attend the early morning proceedings at the Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg. If a judge authorizes his extradition, Mangione would then be brought to New York, where he could appear in state court for arraignment Thursday afternoon or Friday.
The district attorney in Blair County, Pennsylvania, Pete Weeks, has said he was willing to put the Pennsylvania charges on hold while New York authorities prosecute Mangione for the Dec. 4 killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson. Mangione faces charges of murder as an act of terrorism in New York.
Weeks said he would not talk about what might happen at the Thursday hearings or if evidence will be presented. Mangione is accused of giving police a fake New Jersey identification and having a gun and silencer in his bag.
“Those are decisions that rest exclusively with Mr. Mangione and the rights afforded to him,” Weeks wrote in a news release sent out Tuesday.
In a court filing last week, Mangione defense attorney Tom Dickey argued prosecutors hadn’t shown there’s sufficient evidence to hold Mangione, that he was in New York when Thompson was killed or that he is a fugitive from justice.
Mangione, 26, of Towson, Maryland, was arrested on Dec. 9 when police were called to a McDonald’s restaurant on a commercial strip in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after he was reported to match the description of Thompson’s killer.
Thompson was gunned down on the street as he walked to the hotel where his Minnesota-based company was holding an investor conference. The shooting was captured on security video, but the suspect eluded police before Mangione was captured about 277 miles (446 kilometers) west of New York.
Authorities say Mangione was carrying the gun used to kill Thompson, a passport, a fake ID and about $10,000 in U.S. and foreign currency. His lawyer, Dickey, has questioned the evidence for the forgery charge and the legal basis for a gun charge. He had previously indicated Mangione would fight extradition to New York while being held in a Pennsylvania state prison.
Mangione, an Ivy League computer science graduate from a prominent family, was carrying a handwritten letter that called health insurance companies “parasitic” and complained about corporate greed, according to a law enforcement bulletin obtained by The Associated Press last week.
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Sisak reported from New York.
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