Luigi Mangione, a prep school valedictorian and University of Pennsylvania graduate from a wealthy Maryland family who is currently charged with the ambush murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been compared to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. has been done.
“Both sent a message through their violent killings,” said John Kelly, a criminal profiler and head of System to Capture Deadly Killers. “The Unabomber sent a message about the technology industry and how it destroys countries.”
The Kaczynski case was Kelly's first case. The Unabomber, the FBI's abbreviation for University Bomber and Aviation Bomber, delivered 16 bombs over nearly 20 years, including one that detonated after the plane reached a certain altitude.
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Luigi Mangione, the suspected gunman in the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was seen on surveillance footage flirting with a hostel employee before the Dec. 4 shooting. . (New York City Police Department)
“The United Healthcare suspect sent a message to the insurance industry. Unless he is arrested, I don't think this will be his last.”
Kaczynski made his own bombs, and the weapon believed to have killed Thompson included homemade 3D-printed parts, Kelly said.
Police described it as a “ghost gun” with a plastic receiver and suppressor.
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Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, arrives for his arraignment in Helena, Montena on April 4, 1996. (Michael McCaw/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
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“Neither of them had meaningful relationships with women,” Kelly said. “They both may have had schizophrenia. Certainly, the Unabomber had schizophrenia. Luigi is at a ripe age where schizophrenia can develop.”
Kaczynski committed suicide in prison last year after stopping cancer treatment. He was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after reading a manifesto submitted anonymously by his brother. washington post He was extradited in 1995.
Mangione reportedly handwritten his manifesto when he was arrested by police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday. In the manifesto, he allegedly mentioned United Healthcare and the shareholder meeting that Thompson was chairing at the time of the assassination.
“Both were obsessed with and focused on an industry that they wanted to hurt and raise public awareness about,” Kelly said.
United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson (AP Photo/United Health Group)
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Mangione regularly posts on Goodreads, a social media site focused on literature, where he writes book reviews. Kaczynski's manifesto.
“It would be easy to quickly and thoughtlessly dismiss this as a madman's manifesto to avoid confronting some of the unpleasant issues it identifies,” he wrote. “But it is simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society have turned out to be.”
Writing about Kaczynski's “Industrial Society and its Future,” he cited other views online. [he] I thought it was interesting. ”
Luigi Mangione will be taken to Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on December 10, 2024. (Janet Klingbeil, via AP)
“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary for survival,” he wrote. “You may not like the way he does things, but if you look at things from his perspective, it's not terrorism, it's war and revolution.”
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He praised the lone wolf serial bomber as a “mathematical genius.”
Luigi Mangione (Luigi Mangione/Facebook)
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“He was a violent man who was justly imprisoned and maimed innocent people,” he wrote. “While these actions tend to be characterized as the actions of mad Luddites (sic), they are more accurately seen as the actions of extreme political revolutionaries.”
Both men had been living in seclusion even before they were suspected of committing the crime. Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin with no electricity or running water to escape an increasingly technological society. Mangione's mother filed a missing person report with San Francisco police last month, saying she had not heard from her son since July, law enforcement officials said.
The address of the business where she thought he worked was permanently closed.
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This image shows the home of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The entire building was then brought to Washington by the FBI. (Michael Maycall/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
“He becomes a recluse,” said Nicole Parker, a former FBI agent. “That's when he really starts to define what he's going to be. That's probably what started him down the path to violence. But I don't think it's because this kid has never thought like that before. Please don't be fooled.”
But she questioned whether the murder suspect really acted alone.
“I want to see the call history on that burner phone,” she told FOX News Digital. “These feelings didn't start yesterday or three months ago. What are his inner thoughts? No.”
Like Mangione, Kaczynski was a former Ivy Leaguer, Harvard graduate and mathematician. Between 1978 and 1995, the Unabomber killed three people and injured 23 others with a series of bombs that it mailed to victims.
Ted Kaczynski is pictured on June 21, 1996. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
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Surveillance camera footage taken outside the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan shows the masked assassin sneaking up behind Thompson on the sidewalk around 6:45 a.m. on Dec. 4. Mr. Thompson was on his way to a shareholders' meeting at the venue, which was scheduled to begin later that morning. The gunman opened fire from behind.
As the CEO collapsed in the street, a woman who witnessed the attack fled in one direction while the masked person casually walked away in the other direction. The police were tracking his movements all the time. new york city He headed to the bus stop and left about an hour after the killing. They shared surveillance images, which were widely spread online, and police arrested him at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday after a witness recognized him and called 911.
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CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione screams while being restrained by police as he arrives for his extradition hearing in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on December 10, 2024. (David Dee Delgado, Fox News Digital)
Mr. Mangione is being held without bail in Pennsylvania on numerous charges. His lawyers told a judge this week that they intend to fight extradition to New York to delay the second-degree murder case there.
Police told Fox News they are looking into whether any health insurance claims were denied as they investigate a potential motive.
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They allege Mangione admitted to the crime in writing and left behind clues, including shell casings marked with the words “denial,” “defense,” and “expulsion,” and a backpack filled with Monopoly money.
United Healthcare CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione is photographed at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania on December 9, 2024. (Pennsylvania State Police)
The notes left on the shell casings have been compared to the book “Delay, Denial, Defense: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.” The book was not listed on his Goodreads account. Police said Wednesday that the shell casings were a ballistics match to the handgun seized during Mangione's arrest.
“He was sympathetic to an individual, he had a cause, and he allegedly used violence for that cause,” Parker said. “These ideas take a long time to develop, and this shooter had the intelligence and sophistication to do it. [a] The character of someone who is willing to go to extreme measures for something they are passionate about. He believed he was standing up for something, his cause and his identity, to save all the people who have been victimized by the health care industry. ”
Fox News' Michael Lundin, Chris Pandolfo and Stephanie Nolasco contributed to this report.
