‘This Was Not a Typical Street Crime’: Prosecutors Say Luigi Mangione Stalked His Victim, Passed Him on Sidewalk the Night Before Murder

Luigi Mangione, who’s charged with murdering a health insurance executive, Brian Thompson, stalked his victim the night before, and even walked past him on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk, according to New York prosecutors.“The investigation showed that at 7:45pm, on December 3, the night before the execution, defendant was walking on West 54th Street and Sixth Avenue adjacent to the Hilton Hotel. He appeared to be talking on a cellphone, and as he walked down the street, Mr. Thompson walked past him in the opposite direction,” the state prosecutor alleged in a court filing on Wednesday. The disclosure comes as the New York state prosecutors are opposing a new request by the defense to drop the terrorism charge against Mr. Mangione, who is accused of gunning down the UnitedHealthcare CEO on a street in Midtown last December. Prosecutors also oppose delaying their case until the federal case against the murder suspect has been resolved. Mr. Mangione, 27, faces murder charges both in federal and in New York state court. He has also been charged with terrorism by New York state prosecutors and faces gun possession and stalking charges by the federal government. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Last month, his attorneys made a request to delay the state case, which has been scheduled to proceed first, until the federal case is resolved, after the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, released a statement saying she would seek the death penalty for the alleged assassin. “Mr. Mangione,” defense attorneys wrote in their motion, “will be forced to defend his federal death penalty case while at the same time defending against state prosecution seeking life-imprisonment, a truly unprecedented and untenable situation.” On Wednesday, an assistant district attorney, Joel Seidemann, who is prosecuting the case on behalf of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, called the defense’s complaint “disingenuous.” “Defendant now raises the novel argument that this case should be delayed indefinitely because his concurrent state and federal prosecutions violate various constitutional rights,” Mr. Seidemann fumed. The prosecutor argued that “due to extensive litigation” a federal death penalty case could take several years. “It thus appears that the state case will be completed several years before any federal trial begins.” Mr. Seidemann wrote. However, it is uncertain if the federal court will in fact wait “several years” before trying Mr. Mangione. The presiding district judge, Margaret Garnett, told the defendant when he pleaded not guilty to the federal charges on April 25 that she intended to get a trial date for 2026, as the Sun reported. It appears that everyone is eager to take Mr. Mangione to trial as soon as possible. The case has sparked nationwide outrage but also triggered a strange fandom for the alleged killer, whom many consider to be rather handsome. The victim, a husband and a father of two, was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a division of the country’s largest health insurer, which like other big health insurers has come under criticism for how it handles claims from its members. On December 4, 2024, Thompson came to New York to attend a UHC investor conference at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “Mr. Thompson was set to arrive at the conference before 7am to prepare for his conference. … He arrived at the hotel shortly before 6:45am,” Wednesday’s court filing details.Thompson was walking on the sidewalk next to the hotel when Mr. Mangione allegedly approached him from behind, drew a homemade ghost gun equipped with a homemade ghost silencer, and shot Thompson “once in the back and once in the leg from point blank range, thereby killing him,” the filing said. The suspect fled the scene immediately after the shooting. “Mr. Thompson had been shot with a 9-millimeter-semi-automatic pistol,” the prosecutor wrote. “The bullet that killed him entered the left side of the back before piercing his liver, going through his heart and exiting through his chest.” Emergency responders pronounced Thompson dead at the scene. Mr. Mangione is a tech enthusiast who comes from an influential real estate family in Towson, Maryland, outside Baltimore, and was his high school’s valedictorian before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school. He allegedly fled the crime scene on a bicycle.After a five-day manhunt, during which surveillance photos of the suspect were circulated on national media and flooded the internet, the Ivy League graduate was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where an employee called the police after a customer had recognized the young man, who had removed his face mask to eat. Mr. Mangione was extradited to New York in late December. He is being held in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. In the new filing, the Manhattan district attorney’s office also argued why it included a terrorism charge in its 11-count indictment, a charge that defense attorneys had sought to get dismissed. “There was no evidence before the grand jury that the defendant shot Brian Thompson in the back because of some personal vendetta,” Mr. Seidemann wrote. “Nor was there any evidence that the defendant knew Brian Thompson or had ever met him. There was not even evidence that the defendant had ever received insurance from UHC. Defendant’s apparent goal in assassinating Mr. Thompson was thus to send a message.” “Brian Thompson and UHC were simply symbols of the healthcare industry and what the defendant considered a deadly greed-fueled cartel,” Mr. Seidemann added later. The call center at UnitedHealthCare, the court filing said, has received death threats. People call and make threats such as, “You are gonna hang,” or, “That means that the killing of Brian Thompson was just a start. There are a lot more that are gonna be taken out. The only question is whether you’re gonna be their collateral damage when it’s done or not.”Carrying out the alleged murder demonstrated Mr. Mangione’s “concerted effort to broadcast his message of ideological intimidation as broadly and loudly as possible,” the prosecutor wrote.The evidence, the prosecutor argued, says it all. The suspect “chose to execute Mr. Thompson in midtown Manhattan, a place widely known as the media capital of the world.” Furthermore, Mr. Seidemann found, “Defendant’s intentions were obvious from his acts, but his writings serve to make those intentions explicit.” A red notebook was recovered by the police at the time of his December 9 arrest in Altoona. In that notebook, diary entries, allegedly written by Mr. Mangione, depict his frustrations with the health insurance industry and his intent to carry out an attack, providing, prosecutors claim, a clear motive. “The entry dated August 15, 2024, reads in pertinent part as follows: ‘I finally feel confident about what I will do. The details are coming together. And I don’t feel any doubt about whether it’s right/justified. I’m glad in a way that I’ve procrastinated bc (because) it allowed me to learn more about UHC,'” the court filing stated. Another entry allegedly suggests that Mr. Mangione had first considered another target, someone with the initials KMD, but later found it “would do nothing to spread awareness/improve people’s lives.” State prosecutors claim that Mr. Mangione then decided, “The target is insurance. It checks every box.” A diary entry from October reads: “1.5 months. The investor conference is a true windfall. It embodies everything wrong with our health system, and-most importantly-the message becomes self-evident. The problem with most revolutionary acts is that the message is lost on normies.” Mr. Mangione also allegedly criticized bombings in these writings: Bombs “commit an atrocity whose horror either outweighs the impact of their message, or whose distance from their message prevents normies from connecting the dots.” He chose not to bomb the healthcare industry because such an attack would “risk innocents.” An October 22 entry may suggest that the suspect did not in fact want to commit an act of terrorism, when he asked: “Do you bomb the HQ? No. Bombs=terrorism. Such actions appear the unjustified anger of someone who simply got sick/had bad luck and took their frustration out on the insurance industry, while recklessly endangering countless employees.”But the prosecutor argues that the “evidence before the grand jury thoroughly supported the conclusion … that the defendant’s murder was an act of terrorism.” Police investigators obtained surveillance camera footage of the shooting, and the prosecutor found that “the video establishes that this was not a typical street crime.” “The fact that the defendant left Mr. Thompson’s Rolex watch on his dead body demonstrates that robbery was not the motivation behind the assassination.” The prosecutor concluded, “Finally, the defendant communicated the motive behind the assassination by marking two shell casings with the words ‘deny’ and ‘depose,’ and marking ‘delay’ on the live cartridge.” The next hearing at New York state criminal court in Lower Manhattan is scheduled for June 26.

‘This Was Not a Typical Street Crime’: Prosecutors Say Luigi Mangione Stalked His Victim, Passed Him on Sidewalk the Night Before Murder

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