A suspected assassin believed to have gunned down the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was caught after making three key mistakes, according to analysis of his movements.
Detectives hunted the masked gunman with dogs, drones and CCTV for several days after the killing in Manhattan on Wednesday morning. DNA samples and fingerprints were taken and internet addresses were checked. Police went door to door looking for witnesses to the crime that left law enforcement baffled over whether the shooter was an amateur or a professional.
When an arrest came five days later, those sprawling investigative efforts shared credit with an alert civilian’s instincts. A customer at a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania noticed another customer who resembled the man in the oblique security-camera photos that New York police had publicised.
Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland real estate family, was arrested Monday. And although clearly plenty of effort went into the planning of the alleged attack, he made one mistake when he lowered his mask.
Lowering his mask
Before the killing, the suspect is understood to have paid for everything with cash to avoid being traced. He is believed to have gone to New York by bus rather than for example by plane where he would probably have had to show some form of identification or paid by a card. And if he had the gun on him then it would have been detected by airport security.
He went on a Greyhound bus and it is still not clear where he got on, as the bus route began in Atlanta but he may not have boarded there. And no surveillance footage so far has been able to identify him getting on the bus. After arriving in New York on November 24 he again paid for a hostel using cash having given false identification.
And while he diligently wore the mask nearly all the time, he did make a mistake by lowering it on one occasion when he flirted with a hotel employee who asked him to lower the mask. Even that though could have been strategic as he may have thought that by showing his face he would stand out less, but the hostel footage did give him away.
Lowering his mask to reveal his face was “one of his biggest mistakes,” retired FBI special agent Daniel Brunner said, reported CNN. That image was followed by others of him taken by a security camera inside a taxi which just showed his eyes. The weapon he used for the murder was also untraceable as it was a ghost gun, which are self-assembled and don’t have serial numbers, while it may even have been 3D printed.
Shedding evidence
The suspect left a trail of evidence such as a Starbucks water bottle and an energy bar wrapper while a backpack like that which was worn during the shooting was also discovered in Central Park. But these might not have been a mistake said criminologist Casey Jordan.
“I’m not underestimating the intelligence of this particular suspect,” she reportedly said. “So much planning went into this. … We cannot rule out that he planned on us finding the backpack, that he left contra-indicators in there, things that would throw the investigation off.”
Fake IDs, gun and incriminating document
Mangione is suspected of ditching plenty of items but he was found with a series fake IDs, including one believed to have been used in New York. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a Manhattan news conference that Mangione was carrying a gun like the one used to kill Thompson and the same fake ID the shooter had used to check into a New York hostel, along with a passport and other fraudulent IDs. NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Mangione also had a three-page, handwritten document that shows “some ill will toward corporate America.”
And Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after the McDonald’s customer recognized him and notified an employee, authorities said. Police in Altoona, about 230 miles west of New York City, were soon summoned. They arrived to find Mangione sitting at a table in the back of the restaurant, wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop, according to a Pennsylvania police criminal complaint.
He initially gave them a fake ID, but when an officer asked Mangione whether he’d been to New York recently, he “became quiet and started to shake,” the complaint says. When he pulled his mask down at officers’ request, “we knew that was our guy,” rookie Officer Tyler Frye said at a news conference in Hollidaysburg.