A 26-year-old man arrested in connection with the shooting death last week of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City has connections to California, including a brief stint as teaching assistant at Stanford, officials said today (Dec. 9).
Luigi Nicholas Mangione is a “strong person of interest” and was taken into custody after he was spotted by an employee at a McDonalds restaurant Monday morning in Altoona, Pennsylvania, NYC police said in a press conference.
He was carrying a ghost gun with a silencer, multiple fake IDs, and a manifesto criticizing health insurance companies, law enforcement officials said.
Mangione spent summer 2019 as an “Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant” at Stanford University in Palo Alto, where he “designed lesson plans and taught artificial intelligence to gifted high school students,” according to his LinkedIn page.
Stanford officials said Monday that “a person by the name of Luigi Mangione was employed as a head counselor under the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies program between May and September of 2019.”
He designed lessons and taught high school students about AI, during his time at Stanford, according to his LinkedIn. He supervised about 40 participants and led a seven-member team who worked as RAs, or residential assistants, during the program.
Thompson was gunned down on Dec. 4 outside the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan.
New York City police said Mangione was born and raised in Maryland, has ties to San Francisco, and his last known address was Honolulu, Hawaii.
Mangione’s LinkedIn page doesn’t include any ties to San Francisco but shows that he worked for the past four years as a data engineer for TrueCar in Santa Monica.
– Wire & staff report
Why didn’t anyone he knows turn him in? Or any strangers he saw in the next several days? There was a 60K reward. It shouldn’t take an elderly customer at McDonald’s several days later.
All his defenders are as sick as he is. Over 50K collected online for his defense. He comes from a very wealthy family. Unbelievable.