UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooter Charged With Terrorism

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Luigi Mangione
A photo of Luigi Mangione from his X account.

The New York Supreme Court indicted Luigi Mangione Tuesday on murder charges including “killing as an act of terrorism” for the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, accounced Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a press release.

“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” Bragg said in a news conference, according to Reuters. “The intent was to sow terror.”

Mangione is accused of shooting Thompson on the morning of Dec. 4 with an illegally owned, 3D-printed handgun, Bragg said in the release. After Mangione was spotted on Dec. 9 at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, police arrested him and connected the gun found in his backpack with the one used to kill Thompson, according to Bragg.

Mangione’s New York lawyer Karen Agnifilo has yet to comment, but Mangione’s legal team is poised to fight his potential extradition to New York in a hearing Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

Mangione was already charged with murder upon his arrest, but a post-911 New York law allows crimes to be prosecuted as acts of terror if they are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping,” the Associated Press said.

Outside the Manhattan Hilton Hotel where Thompson was killed, investigators found bullet casings inscribed with the words “depose,” “deny” and “defend” – language similar to the title of a best-selling book that criticizing the US healthcare industry.

On Dec. 10, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published an alleged handwritten manifesto by Mangione, which police found on his person at the time of his arrest, according to Newsweek.

“Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” Mangione allegedly wrote in the manifesto. “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.”

Mangione’s political motivations have sparked heated debate about the US healthcare system across the political spectrum. Although Mangione has been praised by many on the online left, some commentators have noted from Mangione’s X profile that his broad, anti-establishment politics reflect a mixture of right-wing and left-wing sensibilities.

Following Thompson’s murder, social media saw a massive surge of highly engaged posts glorifying the incident or suggesting that other corporate figures should “fear for their own lives,” according to a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute.

“There is cause for concern that these patterns reflect the emergence of a permission structure for targeted violence, akin to those historically observed on platforms such as 4chan and 8chan,” the report said.

UWM Digital Arts and Culture Director Marc Tasman thinks that Mangione’s manifesto strikes a chord with many people who are frustrated with the status quo.

“His manifesto resonates with people’s long-running frustration with healthcare in America,” he said. “I also think he’s popular on the internet because he’s good-looking and because he’s of the right age.”

Hasan Piker, a leftist Twitch streamer and X user with 1.5 million followers, made the following post on Tuesday, which received over 100,000 likes:

The comment section offers a taste of the online discourse surrounding the murder of Brian Thompson.

“It’s a clear message to all of us poors, not to mess with our superiors,” said @Imposter_Edits, in a comment that received 4,700 likes.

Other users sympathetic to Mangione made comments calling to “free Luigi” or arguing that Thompson “killed more people than Luigi ever did.”

User @xQc posted the dictionary definition of terrorism as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims,” however, arguing that Mangione’s sentence fits the bill. The comment received almost 10,000 likes and a repost by popular moderate liberal Twitch streamer Destiny.

“Maybe he shouldn’t have committed terrorism then,” commented @bennygabagool.

For Marc Tasman, this moment bears some similarity to 2017’s #MeToo movement

“It’s not about the same content as the #MeToo movement, but it is similar in terms of people on the internet saying, ‘I feel the same way: I’m boiling over with anger about how people with health crises are treated by healthcare companies,” he said.