Everything we know about Luigi Mangione

NEW YORK - A 26-year-old Ivy League graduate who "had everything going for him" is now charged in the high-profile murder of a Fortune 500 CEO.

Here's everything we know about alleged killer Luigi Mangione, including his background, his family and how police connected him to Brian Thompson's shooting death.

➡️Luigi Mangione trial, CEO murder case latest: Everything we know

Who is Luigi Mangione?

The backstory:

Mangione was born and raised in Maryland, coming from an influential real estate family in the Baltimore area.

He was the valedictorian in the 2016 class at Baltimore’s elite private Gilman School. In his graduation speech, he talked about his classmates’ "incredible courage to explore the unknown and try new things," the Associated Press reported.

What they're saying:

"Quite honestly, he had everything going for him," said Freddie Leatherbury, a former classmate. Leatherbury described Mangione as a smart, friendly and athletic student who came from a wealthy family, even by the private school’s standards.

He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, a spokesman told The Associated Press.

He learned to code in high school and helped start a club at Penn for people interested in gaming and game design, according to a 2018 story in Penn Today, a campus publication.

His posts also suggest that he belonged to the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi. They also show him taking part in a 2019 program at Stanford University, and in photos with family and friends in Hawaii, San Diego, Puerto Rico, the New Jersey shore and other destinations.

In a statement, Stanford confirmed someone with the same name was previously employed as a counselor at the college.

"We can confirm 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," a university spokesperson told our sister station KTVU.

According to his LinkedIn account, Mangione was last employed with TrueCar, Inc., a car retailing website. A spokesperson confirmed that "Mangione has not been an employee of our company since 2023."

He also has ties to San Francisco and his last known address is in Honolulu, Hawaii. In recent years, he lived in Surfbreak, a co-living space for remote workers, according to the New York Times.

"We look for people who are looking to give back. And he fit the bill. He was an ideal member for us," R.J. Martin, founder of Surfbreak, told the New York Times. Martin also noted that Mangione's painful back issues made "dating and being physically intimate" nearly impossible. A social media picture from Mangione's account appears to show an X-ray of a spine that had been reinforced with implants.

According to Martin's interview, he believed Mangione had returned to the East Coast in 2023 before traveling back to Hawaii and later Japan. In the months leading up to Thompson's murder, the two had lost contact.

Mangione on the Unabomber

Mangione was a periodic poster on Goodreads, the literature-focused social media site, where he wrote a review for a book by the Unabomber Ted Kaczysnki. 

"It's easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies," he wrote. "But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out."

Writing about Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future," he quoted another online "take that [he] found interesting."

"When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive," he wrote. "You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it's not terrorism, it's war and revolution."

The Mangione family

Luigi Mangione is the grandson of Nick Mangione Sr., a multimillionaire who built his family's fortune in real estate development and later expanded into other businesses and philanthropy, according to the Baltimore Banner.

The Mangione family owns several notable properties, including Turf Valley Resort and Hayfields Country Club, and operates the assisted-living facility Lorien Health Services and radio station WCBM-AM 680, according to The Washington Post. Their philanthropic efforts through the Mangione Family Foundation have supported various medical and research institutions in the region.

After Nick Mangione Sr. stepped back from business duties in 1995, his sons – Luigi's father Louis and uncle John – took over, with Louis leading Mangione Family Enterprises.

Following Luigi's arrest, his cousin Nino Mangione, a Republican Maryland legislator, expressed the family's shock and devastation, offering prayers for all involved.

"Unfortunately, we cannot comment on news reports regarding Luigi Mangione," Nino Mangione said in a statement from the family. "We only know what we have read in the media. Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi's arrest. We offer prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we asked people to pray for all involved. We are devastated by this news."

Manhunt to arrest: How police determined Luigi Mangione was the suspected CEO killer

Timeline:

A few hours after Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel on Dec. 4, police released images of the suspected gunman, who appeared to be a white male who was carrying a distinctive gray backpack.

Investigators later released additional photos of a "person of interest" which showed an unmasked man in the lobby of a Manhattan hostel.

The Saturday following the killing, police released several new images of the person of interest, on camera in a NYC taxi cab. 

The first shows him outside the vehicle and the second shows him looking through the partition between the back seat and the front of the cab. In both, his face is partially obscured by a blue, medical-style mask.

NYPD divers returned to Central Park on Sunday, as they searched for evidence, including the gunman's firearm.

Police believe that after stalking and shooting the Fortune 500 CEO in the ambush attack early Wednesday, the gunman boarded a bike, ditched evidence in Central Park, then hailed a taxi cab on the Upper West Side.

The cab took the gunman to George Washington Bridge Bus Station, where the killer likely boarded a bus to flee New York City, investigators believe.

Retracing the killer's steps

Before the shooting

Police determined from video that the gunman was in the city for 10 days before the shooting. He arrived at Manhattan’s main bus terminal on a Greyhound bus that originated in Atlanta, though it's not clear whether he embarked there or at one of about a half-dozen stops along the route.

Immediately after that, he took a cab to the vicinity of the Hilton and was there for about a half hour, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said.

At around 11 p.m. on the night he arrived, he went by taxi to the HI New York City Hostel. It was there, while speaking with an employee in the lobby, that he briefly pulled down the mask and smiled, giving investigators the brief glimpse they are now relying on to identify and capture a killer.

The shooter paid cash at the hostel, presented what police believe was a fake ID and is believed to have paid cash for taxi rides and other transactions. He didn't speak to others at the hostel and almost always kept his face covered with a mask, only lowering it while eating.

After the shooting

Investigators know from surveillance video that the shooter fled into Central Park on a bicycle and ditched it around 7 a.m. near 85th Street.

He then walked a couple blocks and got into a taxi, arriving at 7:30 a.m. at the George Washington Bridge Bus Station, which is near the northern tip of Manhattan and offers commuter service to New Jersey and Greyhound routes to Philadelphia, Boston and Washington. Investigators don't know what happened next. 

What evidence did police find during the search?

Aside from the images of the suspected gunman released to the public, footage from surveillance cameras has let police retrace the shooter’s movements.

On Friday evening, investigators found a backpack in Central Park that had been worn by the gunman, police said. 

Police also had another potential clue, a fingerprint on an item he purchased at a Starbucks minutes before the shooting.

The missing persons report filed by Luigi’s mom

FOX News reported Luigi’s mother Kathleen Mangione spoke to police the day before his arrest, telling them the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO "might be something that she could see him doing."  

Kathleen filed a missing person report for her son with San Francisco police in November 2024, telling officials she had not spoken to Luigi since July of that year. 

In a news conference, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said investigators in California thought they recognized Mangione from the missing persons report as the person of interest shown in NYPD images and contacted the FBI on Dec. 5 with the tip. Investigators spoke with Kathleen three days later to ask if the suspect could be her son. 

Five days after the killing, police took Mangione into custody inside a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa.

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