Luigi Mangione: Who is the suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson?

A profile is emerging of the 26-year-old man charged with murder over last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson, in New York City.

Police announced on Monday they had arrested Luigi Mangione after he was recognised at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

The Baltimore, Maryland, native was found in possession of a so-called ghost gun, a largely untraceable firearm, and a three-page handwritten document that indicated “motivation and mindset”, officials said.

Mr Mangione was born and raised in Maryland and has ties to San Francisco, California, according to New York Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.

He has no prior arrests in New York and his last previous address was in Honolulu, Hawaii, police said.

He is from a prominent Baltimore family, and attended a private, all-boys high school in Baltimore, called the Gilman School, according to school officials.

Mr Mangione was named as the valedictorian, which is usually the student with the highest academic achievements in a class.

In a statement, the school called the situation “deeply distressing”.

A former classmate, Freddie Leatherbury, told the Associated Press news agency that Mr Mangione came from a wealthy family, even by that private school’s standards. “Quite honestly, he had everything going for him,” Mr Leatherbury said.

Speaking to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, another classmate described themselves anonymously as a close friend of Mr Mangione – saying the shooting suspect “didn’t have any enemies” and was a “valedictorian for a reason”.

Mr Mangione went on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science, according to the school, and founded a video game development club.

A friend who attended the Ivy League college at the same time as Mr Mangione described him as a “super normal” and “smart person”.

Mr Mangione was employed as a data engineer for TrueCar, a digital retailing website for new and used cars, according to his social media profiles. A company spokesman told the BBC he had not worked there since 2023.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr Mangione previously worked as a programming intern for Firaxis, a video game developer.

He also spent time in a co-living surfing community in Hawaii called Surfbreak. Sarah Nehemiah, who knew him then, told CBS he left due to his back injury which had worsened from surfing and hiking.

The three-page, handwritten document found on him suggested a motive, according to investigators. The pages expressed “ill will” towards corporate America, they said.

A senior law enforcement official told the New York Times it said: “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done”.

Investigators say the words “deny”, “defend” and “depose” were written on shell casings found at the scene of Mr Thompson’s murder.

Critics of healthcare insurers call these the “three Ds of insurance” – tactics used by companies to reject payment claims by patients.

Friends have told US media he had surgery on his back. The background image on an X account believed to belong to Mangione shows an x-ray of a spine with hardware in it.

However, it is unclear how much his own experience of the healthcare system shaped his views.

A person matching his name and photo had an account on Goodreads, a user-generated book review site, where he read two books about back pain in 2022, one of them called Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry.

He also gave four stars to a text called Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski – also known as the Unabomber manifesto.

Starting in 1978, Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens of others, until he was arrested in 1996.

In his review, Mr Mangione acknowledged Kaczynski was a violent individual who killed innocent people but the book should not be dismissed as the manifesto of a lunatic, rather the work of an extreme political revolutionary.

His social media profiles also suggest that he had fallen out of touch with family and friends in recent months.

In a post on X from October, someone tagged an account believed to be Mr Mangione’s and wrote: “Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.”

Mr Mangione comes from a prominent family in the Baltimore area who are known for businesses including country clubs, nursing homes and a radio station according to local media.

The suspect’s paternal grandparents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, were real estate developers who purchased the Turf Valley Country Club in 1978 and Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley in 1986.

Shortly after the suspect was charged, Republican state lawmaker Nino Mangione – believed to be Mr Mangione’s cousin – released a statement saying the family was “shocked and devastated”.

“We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved”, the statement read, signing off as “The Mangione Family”.