Police arrested a suspect in the case related to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson from a McDonald’s outlet in Altoona, Pa. An alert customer and an employee tipped off the cops after they spotted Luigi Mangione sitting at a table in the rear of the McDonald's, wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop.
ALSO READ: Did UHC CEO shooter lower mask to flirt with hostel staff?
His clothes and mask were similar to those worn by the shooter. The police found a black, 3D-printed pistol and a 3D-printed black silencer in his backpack, along with writings linking him to the murder.
The 26-year-old has been charged with weapons, forgery and other charges.
Thompson, 50, was killed last Wednesday on the way to a hotel, where UnitedHealthcare's parent company, UnitedHealth Group, was holding its annual investor conference.
Who is Luigi Nicholas Mangione?
Mangione was born into a rich family in Maryland. His family has a country club north of Baltimore. He attended a Baltimore prep school, the Gilman School. The school's website says he graduated as valedictorian in 2016. Mangione earned undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in computer science in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania.
Mangione worked as a “data engineer” at an automobile shopping firm called TrueCar from November 2020 to 2023.
What did Luigi Nicholas Mangione read? Here is what GoodReads reveals
The 26-year-old’s case posits a curious reading history and a trajectory of anti-capitalist sentiments that he seems to have internalised and acted upon. Mangione’s manifesto proclaims, “These parasites simply had it coming.” His socials and virtual bookshelf, however, offer no clear explanation of how the athlete and valedictorian of his graduate class had it coming for himself - or could they? Perhaps one can never tell.
a liked quote from (what seems to be) Luigi Mangione's Goodreads account pic.twitter.com/vUjGgWsFsa
— Jessica (Ka) Burbank (@JessicaLBurbank) December 9, 2024
On the now-private GoodReads account, under Mangione’s name, the spectrum of reads ranges from self-help, Elon Musk, and young-adult fiction to guidebooks for Hawaii. His list finds diverse representation from “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones”, “The 4-Hour Workweek”, “Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future”, and “What’s our Problem? : A Self-Help Book for Societies” to “The Lorax” and “Sapiens : A Brief History of Mankind”.
The internet has gone haywire, ripe with speculations about the 2020 Penn graduate’s anti-establishment ideologies, and the links between his literary engagements and real-life manifestations of his thought processes.
In his review of Theodore John Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future”, (un)popularly known as The Unabomber Manifesto, which clinched four stars, he writes, “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.” He further notes, “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless 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.”
The New York Times reported a highlighted quotation from Mangione’s five-star-reviewed children’s book “The Lorax” by Dr Seuss (one of his recent reads), which read: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” With the 26-year-old becoming the centre of social media celebrations and speculations, Ethel Cain posted an excerpt from Mangione’s GoodReads review on her Instagram story: “These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive ?”, all the while stringing her story to the tagline “violence begets violence”.
Some quarters of the internet have also assigned tags to their “literate king,” who is also “a self-care king putting in the work”. Mangione curiously notes in a section from one of his reviews that “violence never solved anything is a statement uttered by cowards and predators”.
As reported by The New York Post, the suspect’s X account also had an X-ray photo with four pins in a spine; buoying the narrative into the ex-Ivy league student’s apparent hatred for the medical community. Mangione, also had five books centred on chronic back pain on his reading list on GoodReads, including “Crooked : Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery”, and “Why We Get Sick : The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease- and How to Fight It”.
Maryanne Wolf wrote, “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.” What Luigi Mangione became—also read within the broader context of his physical and psychological pain—is one for the books.
