Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was once part of a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassination games, according to reports.
Alejandro Romero, a University of Pennsylvania student in the same Discord gaming group as Mangione, plays the game “Among Us,” where some players must secretly kill others without arousing suspicion. He said he intended to do so.
“The great irony is that we were in this game and realized that we might actually have the real killer among us.” Romero he told NBC News.
“As soon as his picture and name appeared on It was either they called me,” he continued. “Today I didn't talk to anyone who didn't already know what happened.”
Mangione, a Maryland native, was arrested Monday night after a McDonald's employee at a McDonald's franchise in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized him from a wanted poster and called police, who arrested him that morning. He was charged with weapons charges.
Romero, who said he has not seen or spoken to Mangione since 2020, remembers Mangione as a typical college student.
“He just fits the mold,” Romero said. “He looked like any other fratty guy you'd see at a fractal party.”
Romero said the Discord group kept friends connected after the pandemic cut their senior year short, but only for a while, and people drifted away as they got jobs and started their adult lives. It is said that he has begun to do so.
In the years since dropping out of college, Mangione has maintained a bizarre and cryptic political outlook on social media, with posts expressing viewpoints from all corners of the political spectrum.
Mangione also expressed his love for many writers, bloggers, thinkers, and revolutionaries, including Aldous Huxley, Tim Urban, Jonathan Haidt, and Ted Krzysinski, and posted a review of his Unabomber Manifesto on the book review social media site Goodreads. I left a book review. .
What we know about the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson
- Brian Thompson, CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in a “brazen, targeted attack” outside a luxury midtown hotel on Wednesday, police said.
- Mr. Thompson was appointed CEO of UnitedHealth in April 2021. He joined the company in 2004. He was one of several senior executives at the company under investigation by the Justice Department.
- Thompson's wife, Paulette, said she had received threats before her husband was killed.
- The Thompson shooting sparked an online frenzy and even sparked a tasteless lookalike contest in New York.
- A dignitary was arrested by police inside a McDonald's store in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
- The suspect has been identified as Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Maryland. He was a former Ivy League student who hated the medical world.
Follow the Post's live updates on news about Brian Thompson's murder.
The 26-year-old shared a quote on his Goodreads account by Kaczynski, the infamous “Unabomber” who terrorized the country for almost two decades by mailing deadly bombs until he was arrested in 1996.
“Imagine a society that exposes people to situations that make them deeply unhappy and then gives them drugs to take away that unhappiness,” Kaczynski once wrote in a quote Mangione liked.
Romero had similar questions when asked about Mangione's mysterious online persona.
“I feel like people aren't sure how to label him,” he told the outlet. “Personally, I have a hard time understanding how this applies.
