Luigi Mangione faces federal charge that is eligible for death penalty

NEW YORK CITY - Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, appeared in Manhattan federal court on new charges that could potentially carry the death penalty.

JUMP TO: MURDER TIMELINE l CHARGES IN INDICTMENT

Mangione, 26, was extradited from Pennsylvania earlier in the day and is now being held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The 26-year-old Ivy League graduate had been expected to be arraigned Thursday on a state murder indictment in a killing that at once rattled the business community and galvanized some health insurance critics, but the federal charges preempted that appearance. The cases will now proceed on parallel tracks, prosecutors said, with the state charges expected to go to trial first.

During his brief 15-minute court appearance, Mangione responded "yes" when asked if he understood the federal charges against him, which include murder, stalking, and weapons offenses.

Mangione, shackled at the ankles and wearing dress clothes, said little during the 15-minute proceeding as he sat between his lawyers in a packed federal courtroom.

"They're charging him with a type of murder that includes stalking and subjects him, potentially, to the death penalty," said former federal prosecutor Andrew Cherkasky. "He wa also charged with first and second-degree murder in the state of New York, those carry maximum penalties in the murder in the first degree of life without the possibility of parole, but there is no death penalty in the state of New York."

"The radicalization that is taking place across our country, we cannot ignore," NYC Mayor Eric Adams told the media.

The federal complaint charges him with two counts of stalking and one count each of murder through use of a firearm and a firearms offense.

Mangione had been held in Pennsylvania since his Dec. 9 arrest while eating breakfast at a McDonald's in Altoona, about 233 miles (37 kilometers) west of Manhattan.

At a hearing there Thursday morning, Mangione agreed to be returned to New York and was immediately turned over to at least a dozen New York Police Department officers who took him to an airport and a plane bound for Long Island.

He then was flown to a Manhattan heliport, where he was walked slowly up a pier by a throng of officers with assault rifles — a contingent that included New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

Mangione’s lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, said it’s a "highly unusual situation" for a defendant to face simultaneous state and federal cases.

"Frankly I’ve never seen anything like what is happening here," said Friedman Agnifilo, a former top deputy in the Manhattan district attorney's office.

She reserved the right to seek bail at a later point and declined to comment as she left the courthouse.

In Pennsylvania, Blair County District Attorney Pete Weeks had said he wanted to turn Mangione over to New York authorities as soon as possible. Weeks said he was willing to put the Pennsylvania charges on hold.

"He is now in their custody. He will go forth with New York to await trial or prosecution for his homicide and related charges in New York," Weeks said.

Mangione, of Towson, Maryland, is accused of ambushing the 50-year-old Thompson as the executive arrived to a Manhattan hotel for an investor conference.

Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind. Police say the words "delay," "deny" and "depose" were scrawled on the ammunition investigators found at the scene, echoing a phrase commonly used to describe insurer tactics to avoid paying claims.

The gunman then pedaled a bicycle through Central Park, took a taxicab to a bus station and then rode the subway to a train station before fleeing to Pennsylvania, authorities said.

There, a McDonald’s customer noticed that Mangione looked like the person in surveillance photos police were circulating of the gunman, prosecutors said.

When he was arrested, they say, Mangione had the gun used to kill Thompson, a passport, fake IDs and about $10,000.

According to the federal complaint, Mangione also had a spiral notebook that included several handwritten pages expressing hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives. UnitedHealthcare is the largest health insurer in the U.S., though the insurer said Mangione was never a client.

An August entry said that "the target is insurance" because "it checks every box," according to the filing. An entry in October "describes an intent to ‘wack’ the CEO of one of the insurance companies at its investor conference," the document said.

Mangione initially fought attempts to return him to New York. In addition to waiving extradition Thursday, he waived a preliminary hearing on forgery and firearms charges in Pennsylvania.

The killing unleashed an outpouring of stories about resentment toward U.S. health insurance companies while also shaking corporate America after some social media users called the shooting payback.

Mangione, a computer science graduate from a prominent Maryland family, repeatedly posted on social media about how spinal surgery last year had eased his chronic back pain, encouraging people with similar conditions to speak up for themselves if told they just had to live with it.

In a Reddit post in late April, he advised someone with a back problem to seek additional opinions from surgeons and, if necessary, say the pain made it impossible to work.

"We live in a capitalist society," Mangione wrote. "I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life."

He apparently cut himself off from family and close friends in recent months. His family reported him missing in San Francisco in November.

Thompson, who grew up on a farm in Iowa, was trained as an accountant. A married father of two high-schoolers, he had worked at UnitedHealth Group for 20 years and became CEO of its insurance arm in 2021.