Luigi Mangione’s relatives offer prayers for family of late United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson
The family of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old Ivy League graduate who has been arrested and charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, offered prayers for the family of the victim Monday night as the investigation into the motives behind the murder continues.
Brian Thompson served as the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, the insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group, from April 2021 until his murder on Dec. 4 in Midtown, Manhattan.
“Unfortunately, we cannot comment on news reports regarding Luigi Mangione. We only know what we have read in the media,” Nino Mangione, a cousin of the murder suspect and an elected member of the Maryland House of Delegates, wrote on Facebook Monday night.
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“Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest. We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson, and we ask people to pray for all involved. We are devastated by this news.”
Luigi Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. He was found with fake identification, a weapon like the one seen being used in a video of Thompson’s murder, along with a manifesto criticizing the healthcare industry similar to the one seen in the video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry, The New York Times reported.
“To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” the 262-word handwritten manifesto explains with the writer appearing to take responsibility for the murder, a senior law enforcement officer who saw the document reported.
It was also noted in the manifesto that while UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not. The writer further lamented companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
Luigi Mangione’s friends and family told the publication that until about six months ago they had been in regular contact with him, but he was also struggling with a painful back injury.
“His spine was kind of misaligned,” said R.J. Martin, the founder of Surfbreak, a co-living, co-working space in Hawaii where he met the suspect in 2022 during an interview to be a part of the community. “He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.”
Martin said he and others in the community where Luigi Mangione lived for about six months learned how disruptive his back injury was to his life.
“He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,” Martin said. “I remember him telling me that, and my heart just breaks.”
The 26-year-old software engineer who came from a life of privilege is a member of an influential real estate family in the Baltimore area that owned at least two country clubs, the NY Times noted. The family also owned the radio station WCBM which airs politically conservative programming.
On GoodReads, a social media site for bookworms, Luigi Mangione’s now private account says he has 295 books. In January, he left a review of a book containing the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, which appeared to endorse violence as a necessary evil for survival.
“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. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” he wrote before quoting another take on the book he found online that he called “interesting.”
“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution. Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will be costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun,” the review of the book said. “Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense.”
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