< A suspect is in custody. Some Americans are celebrating his alleged actions

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Five days after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in Manhattan, police made their first arrest. Twenty-six-year-old Luigi Mangione was taken into custody on Monday in Pennsylvania. He's now facing charges including murder, the illegal possession of a firearm, and lying about his identity. Here's Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro speaking to reporters after the arrest.

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JOSH SHAPIRO: The attention in this case in the killing of Brian Thompson was helpful, no doubt, in allowing us to capture this killer. But some attention in this case, especially online, has been deeply disturbing as some have looked to celebrate instead of condemning this killer.

CHANG: CONSIDER THIS - authorities believe that they have arrested the person responsible for gunning down the CEO of a health insurance company. What have we learned about Luigi Mangione and his possible motivations?

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CHANG: From NPR, I'm Ailsa Chang.

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CHANG: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week. But many questions still elude easy answers. Who is Mangione? And what might have motivated him? NPR's Maria Aspan has dug into all of this, and she's here with us now. Hi, Maria.

MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.

CHANG: All right, so what have we learned so far about Mangione?

ASPAN: We're still getting a full picture, and there is a lot that doesn't fit the initial speculation about the identity of this health care vigilante. Mangione was, by all accounts, smart and successful. He grew up wealthy in Baltimore. His family owns country clubs and nursing homes and a conservative talk radio station. And he's got a cousin, Nino Mangione, who's a Republican lawmaker in Maryland. Mangione went to an exclusive all-boys prep school called the Gilman School, where tuition is now more than $35,000 per year. He graduated as the valedictorian, and this is from the speech he gave to his high school in 2016.

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LUIGI MANGIONE: The class of 2016 truly has the fearlessness to explore new things and the obvious ability to excel.

ASPAN: And by all accounts, Mangione continued to excel. He went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in four years with both a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science. And then he went on to work in tech until at least last year.

CHANG: So quite accomplished so far. I mean, I know that you've been talking to people who knew Mangione throughout his life. What's been their reaction to the news that he's being accused of such a heinous crime?

ASPAN: Disbelief, shock, sadness - I spoke this morning with Freddie Leatherbury, who went to junior high and high school with Mangione. And he remembers someone who was athletic, smart and well-liked.

FREDDIE LEATHERBURY: He had everything going for him, and on top of that, he was well adjusted socially. He had a lot of friends in a lot of different circles.

ASPAN: Leatherbury told me he hasn't stayed in close touch with Mangione, but he's still wrapping his head around this.

LEATHERBURY: I'm still just in disbelief that the kid that I knew has just taken his life in this direction.

ASPAN: And this is something I also heard from people who knew Mangione more recently.

CHANG: Well, are there any explanations for what could have changed in his life?

ASPAN: He was in some physical pain with his back. In the last couple of years, Mangione was living in Hawaii, and the people there I talked to say that his back pain kept him from surfing, hiking and generally enjoying life as a 20-something there. It also seems that Mangione was spending a lot of time online and following influencers who are big on masculinity-focused self-help advice. He followed libertarian and right-wing influencers like Joe Rogan and a fitness guru who gave advice about, for example, getting a gym membership instead of taking antidepressants. And then in the last year or so, things started to take a more disturbing tone. Mangione even left an online comment that praised the writing of Theodore Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist also known as the Unabomber.

CHANG: Right. I mean, there has been so much speculation that this killing was driven by anger against health insurance companies. In terms of motive, what do we know at this point?

ASPAN: So police have said that Mangione was carrying a handwritten note that railed against corporate America, and it criticized the health insurance industry for being parasitic, according to the AP.

CHANG: That is NPR's Maria Aspan.

The justice system will ultimately determine whether Mangione is guilty of the charges that he's facing, but a separate question lingers, one that may be more difficult to answer. Why have so many Americans celebrated the killing, particularly on social media? That is something New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino has been exploring, and she joins us now. Hi there.

JIA TOLENTINO: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

CHANG: It's great to have you back. So the title of this article is "A Man Was Murdered In Cold Blood And You're Laughing?" Can I just ask you personally, how surprised were you when you saw all the reaction on social media and in comments on news stories about the news of Thompson's murder - people celebrating, joking?

TOLENTINO: I mean, it's certainly remarkable. It's certainly interesting, but I did not find response shocking.

CHANG: You actually - you note some of the more breathtaking responses to this shooting. Can you just share a couple examples that really stayed with you as you were scanning the comments and all the social media posts?

TOLENTINO: Yeah. Well, so the immediate joke thousands and thousands of people were posting were - I'm sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers. You know, and there was another person that wrote, does he have a history of shootings? - denied coverage. You know, UnitedHealthcare posted a announcement about Thompson's death on LinkedIn and had to disable comments because thousands and thousands and thousands of people were posting ha-ha responses, like, cry laughing faces as the response. And yeah, that struck me as remarkable.

CHANG: I mean, let's just step back and talk about, like, what happened. This was a murder in public in a busy part of Manhattan. Thompson was shot in the back. He is the father of two sons. What do you think it does say about the health insurance industry in this country, that people were quite literally laughing at this murder, celebrating his death?

TOLENTINO: Well, I think that there are many forms that violence can take. We tend to focus on acts of violence that are like Thompson's murder - right? - direct, interpersonal violence, right? But there's a lot of other types of it. An extremely common way that a life is unjustly cut short is by the denial of health care.

CHANG: Right. You write that Thompson's murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence. His line of work is another.

TOLENTINO: Right. You know, this corporation is the eighth-largest company in the world. It is incredibly profitable and not despite the fact, but because of the fact that it routinely denies an egregious amount of care to its patients. Its claim denial rate is twice the industry average. UnitedHealthcare denies 32 to 33% of all care requested by a doctor. And so the response, the glee that people are expressing at this cold-blooded murder, is illuminating the fact that many people think of the private health care system in the U.S. and specifically UnitedHealthcare as a company that itself has achieved these billions and billions and billions of dollars of profits in not provisioning health care, but indirectly provisioning death through a kind of severe and immoral and unjust violence on its own.

CHANG: You write that there's indifference on both sides of what we have seen. The indifference of so many people who are reacting to Thompson's death. But also this indifference that you're talking about right now of health insurance companies and the CEO class, as you put it, to the suffering and death of ordinary people. But let me ask you, how do you break this stalemate of indifference? Can you? Or are we all locked into it?

TOLENTINO: Well, you know, one causes the other. The indifference of people to Thompson's murder was entirely, I think, because of the indifference of these health care companies, and if not directly Thompson - obviously, he was not directly responsible for every denied claim, but he presided over it. And me personally, with my own anticapitalist views, do I think that being a CEO of a company like UnitedHealthcare with its ideological responsibilities to its shareholders - do I think that that's compatible with actually taking care of patients? I don't. And I think that puts us in this strange moment where that's suddenly baldly out in the open.

CHANG: Jia Tolentino, staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest article is called "A Man Was Murdered In Cold Blood And You're Laughing?" We reached out to UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, for comment on the social media reaction to Thompson's death. They directed us to a statement that said in part, quote, "our priorities are first and foremost supporting Brian's family, ensuring the safety of our employees and working with law enforcement to bring the perpetrator to justice."

This episode was produced by Kathryn Fink, Lauren Hodges and Alejandra Marquez Janse with audio engineering by Gus Contreras. It was edited by Courtney Dorning, Andrea de Leon and Nadia Lancy. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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CHANG: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Ailsa Chang.

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