Luigi Mangione charged with first-degree murder in UnitedHealthcare killing

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Luigi Mangione has been charged with first-degree murder in New York for what prosecutors alleged was the “frightening, well-planned and targeted” killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson.

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg said that the 26-year-old Ivy League graduate, who was last week arrested by local police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had been formally indicted on one count of murder on the first degree “in furtherance of terrorism”, and two counts of murder on the second degree, one of which was charged as a “killing as an act of terrorism”. He is also facing several lesser charges including criminal possession of a weapon.

“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock . . . and intimidation,” Bragg told reporters on Tuesday. 

The most serious charge, murder in the first degree, carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Mangione is being held without bail in Pennsylvania and is due in court there on Thursday morning.

New York authorities are seeking to bring Mangione back to the city to face the charges. Bragg said Mangione might waive his hearing on the extradition request, which could see him in New York custody by the end of the week.

The indictment returned by the grand jury — including the decision to seek a top charge of first-degree murder — lays bare the seriousness with which New York authorities have approached the slaying of the top executive at the nation’s largest health insurer, which shook New York and corporate America.

Bragg’s office also revealed further details from the ongoing investigation. They said Mangione, an engineering graduate, arrived in New York over a week before Thompson’s murder, checking into an Upper West Side hostel using a fake New Jersey ID on November 24. 

Mangione extended his stay at the hostel, prosecutors alleged, and left early in the morning of December 4 to lay in wait for Thompson outside the midtown Manhattan hotel where he was staying ahead of UnitedHealth’s investor day. Thompson was shot once in the back and once in the leg, and died after being taken to the hospital.

Mangione used a “3D printed ghost gun equipped with a 3D printed suppressor” to shoot the executive, Bragg alleged. “These weapons are increasingly proliferating throughout New York City and the entire country . . . as this case tragically makes clear, they are just as deadly as traditional firearms,” Bragg added.

A morbid wave of appreciation and celebration has proliferated on some corners of the Internet after the killing, particularly with regard to the US healthcare system.

“We have seen a shocking and appalling celebration of cold-blooded murder,” Jessica Tisch, New York Police Department commissioner, said on Tuesday.

“We don’t celebrate murders, and we don’t lionise the killing of anyone. Any attempt to rationalise this is vile, reckless and offensive to our deeply held principles of justice,” she added.