Who is the suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson?

A profile is emerging of the 26-year-old man charged with murder over last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

Police announced Monday that they had arrested Luigi Mangione after he was recognized at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

The Baltimore, Maryland, native was found in possession of a so-called ghost gun, a largely untraceable firearm and a three-page handwritten document that indicated “motivation and mindset,” officials said.

Mr. Born and raised in Maryland, Mangione has ties to San Francisco, California, according to New York Detective Chief Joseph Kenny.

He has no prior arrests in New York and his last previous address was in Honolulu, Hawaii, police said.

He is from a prominent Baltimore family and attended an all-boys private high school in Baltimore called the Gilman School, according to school officials.

Mr. Mangione was named to the peerage, which is usually the student with the highest academic achievement in a class.

In a statement, the school called the situation “deeply disturbing”.

A former classmate, Freddie Leatherbury, told the Associated Press that Mr. Mangione came from a wealthy family, even by private school standards. “Honestly, he had everything right,” said Mr. Leatherbury.

Speaking to the BBC’s American partner, CBS News, another classmate described himself anonymously as a close friend of Mr. Mangione — saying the shooting suspect “had no enemies” and was a “valedictorian for a reason.”

Mr. Mangione went on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, according to the school, and founded a video game development club.

A friend who attended the Ivy League college at the same time as Mr. Mangione, described him as a “super normal” and “smart person”.

Mr. Mangione was hired as a data engineer for TrueCar, a digital retail website for new and used cars, according to his social media profiles. A spokesman for the company told the BBC he had not worked there since 2023.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Mangione previously worked as a programming intern for Firaxis, a video game developer.

He also spent time in a co-living surfing community in Hawaii called Surfbreak. Sarah Nehemiah, who knew him at the time, told CBS he was traveling because of his back injury, which had gotten worse from surfing and hiking.

The three-page handwritten document found on him suggested a motive, according to investigators. The sites expressed “ill will” toward corporate America, they said.

A senior law enforcement official told the New York Times it said: “These parasites had it coming” and “I apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done”.

Investigators say the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were written on casings found at the scene of Mr. Thompson’s murder.

Critics of health insurance companies call these the “three D’s of insurance” — tactics used by companies to deny payment demands from patients.

Friends have told US media that he had back surgery. The background image on an X account believed to belong to Mangione shows an X-ray of a spine with hardware in it.

However, it is unclear how much his own experience with the health care system shaped his views.

A person matching his name and photo had an account on Goodreads, a user-generated book review site, where he read two books about back pain in 2022, one of them called Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry.

He also gave four stars to a text called Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski – also known as the Unabomber Manifesto.

Starting in 1978, Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens of others until he was arrested in 1996.

In his review, Mr. Mangione that Kaczynski was a violent person who killed innocent people, but the book should not be dismissed as the manifesto of a madman, rather as the work of an extreme political revolutionary.

His social media profiles also suggest he had fallen out of touch with family and friends in recent months.

In a post on X from October, someone tagged an account believed to be Mr. Mangiones, writing, “Hey are you ok? No one has heard from you in months and apparently your family is looking for you.”

Mr. Mangione comes from a prominent Baltimore-area family known for businesses including country clubs, nursing homes and a radio station, according to local media.

The suspect’s grandparents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, were real estate developers who bought Turf Valley Country Club in 1978 and Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley in 1986.

Shortly after the suspect was indicted, Republican state legislator Nino Mangione — believed to be Mr. Mangione’s cousin — a statement in which he said the family was “shocked and devastated.”

“Our prayers go out to Brian Thompson’s family and we ask people to pray for everyone involved,” the statement said, identifying itself as “The Mangione Family.”