Luigi Mangione, the teenager accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, thought of himself as a hero and his victim as a symbol of the injustices of private health insurance : this is the meaning of the three handwritten pages of the “manifesto” that the teenager had with him when he was arrested at a McDonald's in Altoona , Pennsylvania, along with the 3D-printed murder gun .
From model student to murderer: the police now fear that the network will make Mangione "a martyr to be followed by example". Formally charged with murder, forgery of documents and three other crimes related to the possession of a weapon, the 26-year-old from Baltimore has been sent to extradition : if found guilty, he faces 15 years to life in prison.
A computer science graduate of UPenn, an Ivy League school, and a video game enthusiast (he loved “Among Us,” a game in which players play assassins on the run), Mangione saw Thompson’s murder as a direct challenge to the “corruption” of the health care industry he had been exposed to for back surgery (the x-ray after the surgical correction with four large nails driven into his spine was prominently posted on his X profile before it was shut down yesterday).
The operation had not been successful and had left him unable to play sports and have normal relationships with girls. Since then, relations with his family, who yesterday said they were "devastated and in shock," had inexplicably ended. On November 18, two weeks before the crime, his mother Kathleen had reported him missing to the San Francisco police, one of the accused's recent stops.
A fourth-generation Italian-American, Luigi came from a clan of Sicilian origin. A Nicola Mangione, who emigrated from Castrogiovanni (modern Enna) had arrived with various relatives at Ellis Island in 1920 to join his brother Luigi in Baltimore, who had already settled with his mother and wife.
Nicholas, the grandfather of the suspected killer, had made his fortune in construction, his wife Mary was active in the arts. Nino, one of Luigi's 30 cousins, is a state representative from Maryland, a conservative Republican in line with the rest of the family who owns a private radio station that broadcasts right-wing talk shows. Luigi, too, in the traces he left on the web, was in his own way a traditionalist: nostalgic for old-fashioned courtship rituals and seeking a more authentic way of life away from social media.
Intrigued by artificial intelligence but uncomfortable with its implications, the boy was inspired not only by the Unabomber (the Harvard mathematician Theodore Kaczynzki who terrorized America in the 1990s with lethal parcel bombs), but also by intellectuals such as Jonathan Haidt and Freya India, exponents of the “Anxious Generation” project on the psychological and social challenges faced by Gen Z.
Two years ago, he moved from California to Honululu, where he lived in a colony of "digital nomads" for about six months. He hoped "that the islands would do him good," said his friend RJ Martin. A lover of reading, Mangione had led a book club in Hawaii, done yoga and trekking but not surfed because of his back. "Sometimes we talked about capitalism and health care," Martin said, "but it didn't seem like he was particularly angry with anyone."
(Online Union)