Luigi Mangione latest: Ghost gun found on suspect matches casings found at United CEO’s murder, cops say

GoFundMe has shut down multiple pages created to support the accused murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

A masked man fatally shot Thompson in Midtown Manhattan on December 4 before escaping out of the city, leading to a six-day manhunt for the gunman, which ended Thursday with the arrest of 26-year-old Luigi Mangione. He has been charged with murder.

The insurance executive’s death captivated the nation and sparked serious conversations about the state of health care in the U.S., with some even celebrating the execution as many shared stories of being denied coverage for care. Since his arrest, GoFundMe pages have cropped up in support of Mangione, and the fundraising site has been removing them. It’s not immediately clear how many pages the site took down.

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A high school classmate of the suspect under arrest for fatally gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week said the news “came out of nowhere,” and described the situation as “just, really surreal.”

“He had a lot of things going for him,” Ellison Jordan, who graduated from the Gilman School alongside 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, told The Independent. “He was always cool people.”

Jordan attended Gilman, a prestigious all-boys prep school in Baltimore, with Mangione, and found him to be “a smart dude,” and “a regular guy,” he said on Tuesday.

“I’m being sensitive to Luigi, because I went to school with him,” Jordan, who has not spoken to the media previously about Mangione, went on. “I hope he didn’t do it. I’m praying he didn’t do it. It’s still ‘allegedly.’ It’s really shocking.”

Justin Rohrlich has the exclusive story.

Luigi Mangione’s lawyer is a seasoned trial attorney based in Pennsylvania with more than 40 years of experience.

Thomas Dickey was brought onto the case on Tuesday, one day after his client was arrested in a McDonald’s in the town of Altoona. The 26-year-old now faces a second-degree murder charge in connection to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by New York prosecutors who are seeking his extradition to the state.

Dickey said he expects his client will plead not guilty.

The lawyer, who claims to be “one of the few death-penalty qualified attorneys” in Pennsylvania, said on Tuesday night that it was “concerning” his client had been denied bail at an extradition hearing at Blair County courthouse earlier in the day.

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In the days since the 26-year-old was arrested in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, comments from friends and family have painted a picture of the murder suspect.

Those close to Mangione seem “shocked” by the events that have unraveled in the past week.

“Unfortunately, we cannot comment on news reports regarding Luigi Mangione,” said the family in a statement posted on X by Luigi’s cousin Nino Mangione, a Republican member of the lower house of Maryland’s state legislature. “We only know what we have read in the media.”

One former Penn classmate told The Independent that she couldn’t believe the news.

“It’s really shocking…He never gave off a weird, creepy, Unabomber vibe” in college, she said. He didn’t post passionately about social causes in undergrad, so “I guess something really took a turn,” she added.

Some of his friends have discussed how Mangione suffered from debilitating back pain.

“He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve. Sometimes he’d be doing well and other times not,” one friend told the New York Times. “He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible. I remember him telling me that, and my heart just breaks.”

After his arrest, Mangione was charged and arraigned on five Pennsylvania offenses including forgery, falsely identifying himself, and carrying a gun without a license.

On Monday, he made a brief appearance at the Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg where he was informed of the charges against him and said he understood.

The suspect returned to the Blair County Courthouse as he faced an extradition hearing Tuesday after New York prosecutors charged him with second-degree murder in connection with last week’s brazen killing of Thompson in Midtown Manhattan.

“It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience,” Mangione yelled as he was escorted in handcuffs into the courthouse.

Blair County District Attorney Peter Weeks said both Pennsylvania and New York’s governors remain confident they can get the warrant to transfer him back to the Empire State before the 30-day deadline.

Mangione was denied bail, is fighting extradition, and will remain in a Pennsylvania jail. He is set to plead not guilty to all charges, his attorney Thomas Dickey told NewsNation on Tuesday.

Read everything we know about Luigi Mangione here.

The gun found on the murder suspect is a positive match with the shell casings found at the crime scene, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Wednesday.

“We got the gun in question back from Pennsylvania... we were able to match that gun to the three shell casings found in Midtown at the scene of the homicide,” she said.

Lab results also showed a match between Mangione’s fingerprints with prints found on both the water bottle and the Kind bar near the scene of the homicide in Midtown, Tisch said.

The man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson followed Richard Dawkins and RFK Jr, tweeted about neuroscience and Japanese birth rates, and shared posts about how to think more logically.

The 26-year-old was fascinated by AI and decision theory; pro-technology but anti-smartphones; secular and scientific in his outlook, but in favour of religion on Darwinian grounds.

What does it all mean? Luigi Mangione’s worldview might not be familiar to most Americans, and it’s certainly not a common one among politically-motivated killers. Nevertheless, his social media posts, and the users he engaged with, mark him out indelibly as a very specific type of online person – one that’s intimately familiar to me.

”Increasingly looks like we’ve got our first gray tribe shooter, and boy howdy is the media not ready for that,” wrote the journalist and extremism expert Robert Evans, who analyzed Mangione’s online life earlier this week.

There’s no single accepted name for this loose, extremely online subculture of bloggers, philosophers, shitposters and Silicon Valley coders. “The gray tribe” is one term; ”the rationalist movement” is another.

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Joe Rogan chalked up the country’s mixed reactions to the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO to the “dirty business” of health insurance.

Rogan and his guests, filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, discussed the December 4 death of Brian Thompson on a Midtown Manhattan street on Tuesday’s episode of the mega-popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

The podcaster and his guests predicted there wouldn’t be much sympathy for the 50-year-old insurance executive due to the state of health insurance in the U.S.

“I don’t think anybody is going to be crying too hard over” Thompson’s death, Avary said.

“Maybe his family, but that’s about it,” Rogan replied. “It’s a dirty, dirty business. The business of insurance is f***ing gross. It’s gross, especially healthcare insurance.”

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