Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Friday said he had learned of information suggesting Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, won’t challenge his extradition from Pennsylvania to New York.
“Indications are that the defendant may waive, but that waiver is not complete until a court proceeding,” Bragg said at an unrelated press conference in Times Square.
“Until that time, we’re going to continue to press forward on parallel paths, and we’ll be ready whether he’s going to waive extradition or contest extradition.”
AP
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office has charged Mangione with second-degree murder and weapons posession. (AP)
In a criminal complaint filed Monday, Bragg’s office charged Mangione, 26, with second-degree murder, three weapons possession offenses, and criminal possession of a forged instrument for the early morning murder that occurred on Dec. 4 outside the Hilton Hotel in Midtown.
Manhattan prosecutors on Thursday started presenting evidence to a grand jury to secure an indictment for the high-profile killing, according to ABC. The DA’s office declined to comment on or confirm the report.
Mangione has been detained in Pennsylvania since his arrest on Monday and has been denied bail. Bragg and Gov. Hochul’s office have said they are coordinating to submit an extradition request to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office.
Earlier this week, his attorney, Thomas Dickey, indicated he would challenge his extradition to New York. He could not be reached for comment on Bragg’s comments on Friday. Mangione is next due in court on Dec. 23, according to Pennsylvania court administrators.
PA Department of Corrections, Altoona Police Department / Getty
Luigi Mangione in police custody in Pennsylvania. (PA Department of Corrections, Altoona Police Department / Getty)
Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two, was arriving for UnitedHealthcare’s annual investor conference when he was shot dead in the street, surveillance footage shows. The suspect fled the scene on a bike and police say was en route out of the city within 45 minutes, leading to a five-day manhunt.
Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s more than 200 miles away in Altoona after someone in the fast food restaurant recognized him from widely circulated stills taken from footage related to the New York assassination.
According to Pennsylvania law enforcement and the NYPD, he was in possession of a 3D-printed ghost gun and silencer and bullets that matched those recovered at the scene — which bore the words “delay,” deny,” and “defend,” in an apparent reference to the insurance industry routinely delaying claims to maximize profits — as well as fake IDs.
He’s charged in Pennsylvania with carrying an unlicensed firearm, forgery, and presenting a fake ID to cops. Blair County DA Peter Weeks has said he will not seek to prosecute Mangione on the those charges before he is tried in New York.
When he was arrested, Mangione was also in possession of a roughly 260-word note appearing to lay out a motive for his suspected shooting of Thompson, according to the NYPD.
In it, he wrote that the U.S. had the most expensive health care system in the world yet ranked 42nd in life expectancy. He wrote that insurers had “simply gotten too powerful,” continuing to “abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has [allowed] them to get away with it.”
“Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” Mangione wrote, the police allege.
On Wednesday, the NYPD alleged Mangione’s fingerprints were found on a water bottle and KIND bar wrapper near the scene. They said they were also testing bullets found in a bag near where a backpack was found believed to belong to Mangione in Central Park.
AP
Brian Thompson was arriving for UnitedHealthcare’s annual investor conference when he was shot dead in the street. (AP)
The Ivy League graduate is from a well-known family in Baltimore, Md., that owns real estate, including a network of nursing homes and country clubs. His last known address was in Hawaii, according to cops.
According to his LinkedIn page, he graduated with Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020, and he was the head counselor in a Stanford University program that taught artificial intelligence to gifted high school students. After college, he worked as a data engineer for TrueCar in San Francisco.
Authorities say Mangione was not a client of UnitedHealthcare, but they are investigating his experiences with the industry for potential motives. The founder of a co-living space in Honolulu where Mangione lived for six months, R.J. Martin, told The New York Times this week that he was suffering from a spinal misalignment. Mangione posted on Reddit and other forums about the long-lasting pain he experienced that led to spinal fusion surgery. His cover photo on X appears to show an x-ray taken after he underwent the procedure.
