Pennsylvania Department of Corrections via AP
This booking photo released December 9, 2024, by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections shows Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
On September 21st of this year, a cousin of Luigi Mangione, now charged in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, reached out to high school classmates about his disappearance. The text message, reviewed by the Prospect, offers new revelations about the developing timeline and backstory of the suspect now in police custody and denied bail after being apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
The message, referring to Mangione, read: “Have you heard anything from him in the past couple months? Or know anyone who has? He got back surgery about 6 months ago and we haven’t heard from him since.” None of the high school classmates had heard from Mangione either, though some being contacted by the cousin hadn’t spoken to him since high school at Gilman, a small private prep school in Baltimore, Maryland.
Mangione’s mother filed a missing persons case with the San Francisco Police Department on November 18th, according to The San Francisco Standard. Based on the date and contents of the text message, Mangione had not been heard from for a couple of months before that, at least by his family.
In a since-deleted post on X from this July, a user posted at Mangione’s handle as a last resort to inquire about whether he still planned to speak at his wedding, as agreed to, since he had not been able to get in touch with Mangione by other means. Mangione’s own X feed has not been posted to since June.
The relative’s message indicated the back surgery would have happened this spring, which doesn’t line up with other testimonies thus far.
The only other known recent contact with Mangione took place in August of 2023, when his former roommate in Hawaii, RJ Martin, reached out to check in with him regarding his recent back surgery.
On CNN last night, Martin, who lived with Mangione in a co-living space in Honolulu mostly for remote tech workers, confirmed that his friend had undergone surgery a year ago because of debilitating chronic back pain. Other outlets have pinpointed the surgery as happening in July 2023.
Before going private, Mangione’s profile on the book review platform Goodreads listed several books about treating back injuries and pain generally, one being Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery. The Goodreads profile also showed a potential interest in more experimental remedies, such as psychedelics use.
In an interview with The New York Times, Martin said Mangione had left the co-living space in 2023 to seek consultation with his doctor on the East Coast. He returned to Hawaii and then departed again for the surgery that year. Martin reached out in August of 2023 to Mangione, who sent him the photos of the surgery. Martin asked if he was OK because the screws looked severe. The header image on Mangione’s X account, now suspended, showed that same grisly X-ray image of a spine with several giant screws in it.
“So, long story,” Mr. Mangione replied, according to Mr. Martin. “Will fill ya in in person. Back in Hawaii as soon as I can, I have to figure out some spine stuff here first.” Mangione never heard from him and reached out periodically again from March to June of this year and received no response.
Martin told CNN that Mangione never talked about violence or guns while he was at the co-living space, which costs $2,000 a month. “He was absolutely not a violent person, as far as I could tell,” Martin told CNN.
This same description is confirmed by his classmates from high school contacted by the Prospect, who expressed shock upon learning he was a suspect in a premeditated assassination of a health care executive. Shell casings from the bullets found lodged in Thompson’s body read, “Deny. Defend. Depose,” suggesting the motivation for the attack was related to a claim denial by the health insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group.
Contrary to the lone-wolf stereotype, classmates say Mangione was affable, social, and intelligent. He was on the wrestling team in ninth grade at Gilman, and ended up being the class valedictorian before going off to undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania. “I thought it was a joke at first when I heard. I thought it was a meme,” said Aaron Cranston, a classmate from Gilman who’d heard about his disappearance months ago from others.
Mangione comes from an illustrious and well-connected Italian American family with deep roots in Maryland. His cousin Nino is a Republican state lawmaker. The family are real estate developers, owning a well-known country club called Turf Valley in Ellicott City. They also run WCBM, a radio station airing conservative political commentary, as well as a chain of nursing homes called Lorien Health Services. Mangione periodically volunteered at Lorien during high school, according to his LinkedIn page. After graduating from Penn, he worked at a car sales tech company.
Mangione was very active online, with eclectic and far-reaching interests in politics, technology, and health. His Goodreads profile contains several quotes from Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.
Classmates say Mangione was never particularly political in high school. He was ambitious and exhibited more interest in the development of technology.
