He posted pictures of hikes with friends in California, smart student frat parties at his Ivy League university and would routinely show off his dazzling smile and muscled torso. 

Indeed, there was little in Luigi Mangione’s social media profile that set him apart from the average, somewhat narcissistic, young person on the cusp of a successful career in the technology industry.

Yet 26-year-old Mangione was charged on Monday with the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson after being arrested at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. 

Police said yesterday that they believe Mangione saw targeting the head of America’s biggest health insurance company as a ‘symbolic takedown’ by a ‘hero’ who might inspire others as a ‘martyr and an example to follow’.

They revealed that Mangione had been carrying a handwritten, 262-word ‘manifesto’ when he was arrested that expressed ‘ill will towards corporate America’ and ominously claimed: ‘These parasites simply had it coming.’

It also made specific reference to UnitedHealthcare, noting how, while the multi-billion-dollar company had grown, US life expectancy had not. In what seems to be a tacit admission that he’d killed Mr Thompson, Mangione wrote: ‘To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone.’

He condemned companies that ‘continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it’.

However, the biggest mystery to those acquainted with Mangione is how a talented young man with such a promising future would, as one shocked friend put it, ‘self-destruct’. 

Suspect Luigi Mangione is taken into the Blair County Courthouse on Tuesday

Luigi Mangione is an heir to Turf Valley Resort which was created by his grandparents and has a sister who is a respected doctor 

Mangione suffered with a misaligned spine from childhood but the condition was seriously aggravated after he took a surfing lesson shortly after arriving in Hawaii, landing him in bed for a week with back pain

For up until very recently, Mangione hardly fit the usual profile of killers as socially awkward and isolated people with an obvious grudge against the world.

To those who knew him, the scion of a wealthy and well-respected Baltimore Italian-American clan whose grandfather had been a multi-millionaire property developer was charming and outgoing. 

And the long delay between his face being revealed in CCTV stills in a New York hostel last week and his arrest and identification on Monday may largely be explained by the fact that so many who knew him just couldn’t believe it was possibly him.

Mangione’s family developed a string of nursing homes, country clubs and conference centres, as well as a politically conservative radio station.

He was educated at a prestigious all-boys’ private school, the £30,000-a-year Gilman School, where he was remembered as athletic but quiet, and enormously academic. 

He wrestled and played soccer, and was valedictorian – or top of his year academically – when he graduated.

One of the brightest boys in a school which boasts of producing future US senators and state governors, he was particularly gifted at computing and designed an app that could fly a paper plane around obstacles. 

He was idealistic even then, although his blogs about the potential of computer science to bring social equality had none of the violent nihilism in recent days.

Luigi Mangione pictured with his family. Pictured: Paul Giulio, Lucia Mangione Giulio, Luigi Mangione, MariaSanta Mangione and his mother Kathy 

Luigi Mangione’s great-grandfather founded the nursing home Lorien Health Services. Luigi volunteered at the nursing home in 2014, according to his Linked In

While still at school, he worked in an assisted living facility for the elderly – run by his family – for a few months.’

Read More

Inside the lavish life of the health boss ‘hitman’: UPenn grad is heir to vacation resort empire

‘There was really nothing off about the kid,’ said old school mate Freddie Leatherbury. ‘He had a lot going for him.’

Mangione went on to the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, where he took bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. 

He was also a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, an elite society open to the smartest electrical and computer engineers. 

He started up a club devoted to creating video games. ‘

‘He was just a normal frat guy. He played beer pong. Some girls thought he was hot,’ said a former classmate.

Indeed, an online Facebook chat group called ‘Penn Crushes’ tagged Mangione in a post from May 2019 that read: ‘Hot damn. Are you single? You make us engineers have hope!’ 

He wrote back: ‘Despite all my best efforts… yup still single.’

Luigi’s grandfather Nicholas Mangiano lived in the above $1.9million home when he died, which was located within the bounds of his country club 

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed outside Manhattan’s Hilton Hotel on Wednesday

After graduating, Mangione worked as a software engineer for an online car sales company and in 2022 moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where he worked remotely.

However, his stint in Hawaii saw the onset of a debilitating medical condition – chronic back pain.

He’d suffered with a misaligned spine from childhood but the condition was seriously aggravated after he took a surfing lesson shortly after arriving in Hawaii, landing him in bed for a week with back pain. 

Read More

Luigi Mangione’s cousin is Maryland Republican lawmaker

His condition – spondylolisthesis – involved the slippage of a vertebra in the spine, which in his case may have trapped a nerve, causing excruciating agony. The pain so dominated his life that it left him unable to have sex.

‘He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,’ said RJ Martin who lived with him in Hawaii. 

‘I remember him telling me that and my heart just breaks.’ Josiah Ryan, who also knew him then, said the back issue ‘affected all parts of his life… it was always sort of a shadow with him’.

It also emerged that he was the author of a series of posts on the online forum Reddit in which he revealed that after the surfing injury, the pain became worse a few weeks later when he slipped on a piece of paper. 

He said he suffered pain when he sat down, twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his groin and bladder.

Luigi’s mother Kathleen Zannino Mangione owns a boutique travel company specializing in the Mediterranean 

Mangione grew up in considerable comfort in this $800,000 home in Towson, Maryland 

In the summer of 2023 he had major surgery, a procedure known as a spinal fusion that uses screws and rods to fuse two parts of the spine. It appears he posted the X-ray of the giant pins inserted into his spine on his X account.

Five books about back pain featured in the long list of literature he reviewed on the website Goodreads. One of them, Crooked: Outwitting The Back Pain Industry And Getting On The Road To Recovery, disclosed a suspicion of the health industry.

Others included self-help books about health and the body, including one in which he revealed his contempt for social norms by saying his mother had attempted to wean him off being left-handed.

Mangione claimed that the spinal fusion surgery cleared up his problems to the point he didn’t need pain medication – although there has been speculation that he may have turned to psychedelic drugs, in which he showed great interest online, after his surgery.

British-Indian online writer Gurwinder Bhogal said yesterday that he exchanged dozens of emails and a two-hour video call with Mangione earlier this year in which the latter revealed he envied the UK’s NHS as the US system was too expensive. 

‘He was so thoughtful and soft-spoken that he seemed like the last person I’d suspect of murdering someone,’ said Mr Bhogal.

Meanwhile Mangione’s family – which includes a sister who is a doctor and another, an artist – said they lost touch with him a few months after his surgery. When they contacted his friends, they reported that they had, too – saying he stopped replying to texts some six months ago.

Luigi Mangione is a person of interest in the killing of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson

Luigi is pictured with his mom Kathleen and dad Louis (both in purple) and sister MariaSanta (in burgundy) at a San Diego wedding ceremony

Although friends are sceptical that he’d had a mental breakdown, it became clear that something had changed radically inside his mind.

His reading choices listed on Goodreads showed he was increasingly interested in violent activism.

In January came an unnerving review of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society And Its Future’, which he gave four stars.

Kaczynski was a Harvard-educated maths prodigy who became a recluse and an anarchist bomb-maker who sent explosives through the post and killed three people, targeting executives at big US companies such as Boeing and United Airlines.

Mangione hails him as ‘an extreme political revolutionary’ who deserved to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as a homicidal lunatic. ‘When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive,’ Mangione writes.

‘These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids… 

‘Violence never solves anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.’

Some now believe Mangione was directly inspired by Kacyznski even though he insisted to others he abhorred his murderous tactics.

It was widely assumed that the alleged gunman would have a personal connection with UnitedHealthcare but none has yet to surface.

It remains unclear whether he developed a grievance against the company over treatment for his own back problems. And while he once received an official warning for trespassing on a beach in Hawaii, he had no other apparent criminal history.

That admirable track record has, of course, come to an abrupt end in a Pennsylvania court house this week.