Yesterday I titled my post “Hit Man Still Unidentified and Still At Large” and said I expected to “turn on the news and there will be an announcement that they’ve captured the ‘person of interest’ and have brought him in for questioning.”
After I posted that thought, the ‘person of interest’ was spotted, arrested, and charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson later that day.
The man detained by police in Pennsylvania in connection with the shock slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been identified as Luigi Mangione.
Mangione, 26, is an ‘anti-capitalist’ Ivy League graduate. He was taken into custody after a McDonald’s employee in Altoona, around 100 miles east of Pittsburgh, believed they recognized him as the gunman.
He reportedly had a 3D-printed ghost gun similar to the one used in the Wednesday morning murder, along with a gun silencer, a manifesto, and four fake IDs when he was arrested by cops.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: college students, including the rich ones at Ivy League schools, are often radicalized by their professors and turned into progressive anti-capitalists who believe socialism hasn’t been tried hard enough yet.
The suspected gunman reportedly referenced UnitedHealthcare in the handwritten document found on him.
Luigi Mangione mentioned the $515.93 billion company in his manifesto noting the size of the company and how much money it makes, a senior law enforcement offical who saw the document told the New York Times.
In the 262-word handwritten manifesto, Mangione said as UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not.
The document condemned companies that ‘continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
He reportedly wrote that acted alone and that he was self-funded.
‘To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,’ Mangione said.
‘These parasites had it coming. I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.’
Note that he blames you and me—”the American public”—for letting companies make immense profits. I don’t disagree that the healthcare corporations “abuse our country for immense profit,” but they’ve been allowed to by political elites, not “the American public.”
Obamacare is the most egregious of the offending sprockets in the healthcare insurance machine that rules doctors and patients. That’s a Democrat invention that conservatives vehemently opposed.
But killing CEOs isn’t the answer. Dismantling the healthcare insurance industry is.
His motive is believed to be tied to the behemoth US healthcare industry’s treatment of a sick relative or even himself, sources said.
As I wrote yesterday, the most likely motive for the execution was personal. That seems to have had something to do with the shooting, but it also seems clear from the manifesto and Mangione’s anti-capitalist rage that the financial disparity between the very rich executives of a very rich enterprise and the “victims” of their ‘larceny’ was also a factor.
The tech ace and onetime prep-school valedictorian was taken into custody by local cops after the worker at the fast-food joint called 911 Monday morning, authorities said.
“He was sitting there eating,’’ NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters of Mangione.
Mangione was wearing a blue medical mask and “a beanie’’ and staring at his silver laptop on the table, with a backpack on the floor next to him, when two Altoona cops approached him, authorities said.
The officers asked him to take off his mask — and immediately confirmed he was the sought-after slay suspect, officials said.
I’m glad they caught the guy and I hope they put him away for a thousand years for the cold-blooded murder of Brian Thompson. But I also hope that the killing, while reprehensible and indefensible, might nonetheless focus attention on the power of the healthcare giants and force some kind of reckoning.