UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead by a masked gunman outside a New York City hotel last week in an apparent assassination that has gripped the public’s imagination.

CCTV footage of the incident in the early hours of December 4 shows the suspect drawing his weapon and firing at least three times at close range. The 50-year-old CEO drops to the floor in the video, later dying from his wounds.

After days of speculation as to the motivation and identity of the gunman, police in the US state of Pennsylvania on Monday arrested 26-year-old Luigi Nicholas Mangione.

Here’s what we know about the man named as a “strong person of interest” in the fatal shooting.

Arrest

New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a worker recognised the suspect from police photos and alerted authorities.

Mangione was found sitting at a table looking at a silver laptop and wearing a blue medical mask, according to authorities.

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When asked if he had been to New York recently, Mangione “became quiet and started to shake”, according to a criminal complaint.

Mangione was carrying a US passport and multiple fake IDs at the time of his arrest, including one with the name Mark Rosario, which was used to check into a hostel in New York City before the shooting, according to Tisch.

Mangione also had a silencer and a gun “both consistent with the weapon used in the murder”, according to police.

Police suspect the weapon to be a “ghost gun” – one assembled at home without a serial number, possibly made using a 3D printer.

Tisch said Mangione was carrying a “handwritten document” which outlines “both his motivation and mindset” for Thompson’s murder.

Authorities late on Monday charged Mangione with murder, possession of an unlicensed firearm, forgery and providing false identification to police.

Motivation

Police have not publicly released that handwritten note, nor offered details about its contents.

US media, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, reported that the note contained the lines, “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done”.

Investigators said last week the words “defend”, “deny” and “depose” were written on the casings of bullets found at the scene of the murder.

Many have interpreted the words as a nod to tactics allegedly used by US health insurance companies to avoid paying claims to patients, speculating that Mangione may have acted in anger against the industry.

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Insight into Mangione’s possible worldwide can also be found in a sympathetic review of Industrial Society and Its Future, aka the Unabomber Manifesto, posted from what appears to be his account on the website Goodreads.

The review describes Ted Kaczynski – who was responsible for a decades-long bombing campaign across the US that killed three people and injured 23 others – as an “extreme political revolutionary”.

“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 review reads.

The review also states that “violence is necessary to survive” when all other forms of communication fail, calling those who reject this notion “cowards and predators”.

The same Goodreads account also liked a quote by author Kurt Vonnegut reading: “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves”.

Background

Mangione was born into a wealthy family in the US state of Maryland, where he graduated from an elite all-boys private institution, the Gilman School, as high school valedictorian in 2016.

Mangione then attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating from the Ivy League school in 2020 with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics.

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Stanford University has confirmed that a person by the same name was employed at the school between May and September of 2019, working as a head counsellor under the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies programme.

Mangione, who developed a game app as a teenager, worked as a “data engineer” at a vehicle shopping firm called TrueCar from November 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. A TrueCar spokesperson said that he had not worked there since 2023.

Mangione lived in Hawaii according to his now-suspended X account, where he regularly posted about technological advances like artificial intelligence, fitness and healthy living.

The banner on his profile included an X-ray image of a person’s lower back with what appears to be screws and plates inserted into it.

Other reviews found on Mangione’s Goodreads account were related to health and healing back pain, including, Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.