A grand jury in New York could hand up an indictment against Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old Ivy League grad arrested last week in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
A source familiar with the investigation said the indictment could come as soon as this week. The move would strengthen the Manhattan district attorney’s case for extradition by making the charges official.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said she plans to issue a warrant for extradition to New York as soon as Mangione is indicted. Currently, the 26-year-old is still in jail in Pennsylvania.
Three lawyers visited Mangione in prison on Friday, including a new attorney on his case, Karen Friedman Agnifilo. She is a longtime veteran of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. She will be representing Mangione on any charges that come from New York.
a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections on Friday told Newsweek that Mangione was being held in a small cell and not in solitary confinement. Mangione is “not interacting with other inmates at this time” and “has taken every meal in his cell,” she said.
Mangione was arraigned last Monday in Pennsylvania on two felony charges — forgery and carrying a firearm without a license — and three misdemeanors: tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of crime and providing false identification to law enforcement.
Earlier that day, as law enforcement was working that lead and many others, Mangione was spotted at the McDonald’s location in Altoona and arrested shortly after by local police.
Police have detailed some of the evidence they said links Mangione to the scene of the shooting, including fingerprints and ballistic evidence.
Roughly a half hour before the shooting, video from a Starbucks location in midtown Manhattan showed the masked-up killer buying a bottle of water and a KIND bar. Police said five fingerprints on a water bottle and and two fingerprints on a KIND bar wrapper found near the scene of the shooting matched Mangione’s.
The gun found on the suspect when he was arrested Monday was sent to the NYPD, according to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. The department confirmed there was a ballistics-related match as well, with shell casings from the scene of the shooting matching those found in the weapon.
“We brought [the gun] to our forensics laboratory, where we were able to match that gun to the three discharge shell casings were recovered at the scene. So it was a ballistics match,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told NBC New York in an exclusive interview Thursday.
Kenny said during that interview that there was “no indication” he ever was a client of UnitedHealthcare, and that he may have targeted CEO Brian Thompson outside a hotel the morning of Dec. 4 simply due to the size of the company and because he knew there was a conference taking place at the hotel that day.
“We have no indication that he was ever a client of United Healthcare, but he does make mention that it is the fifth largest corporation in America, which would make it the largest healthcare organization in America. So that’s possibly why he targeted that that company,” said Kenny.
In his alleged writings, Mangione wrote about wanting to use a gun to target a CEO of a big corporation, like UnitedHeathcare, at a conference.
“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” writings inside a notebook believed to belong to him stated.
Between the writings and posts on social media he made about what Kenny called a “life-altering injury” that required screws being inserted into his spine, police were looking into what could point to a possible motive for the alleged shooting.
While police said they got some DNA recovered from a cellphone believed to be Mangione’s, they won’t be able to compare it to anything until he is extradited back to NYC and they can get a court-ordered sample. They also have not been able to get into the cellphone found in an alleyway, according to Kenny.
Mangione is next scheduled to appear in court on gun charges in Pennsylvania on Dec. 30. Kenny said the NYPD hopes Mangione will be returned to New York City “within the next 30 days.”
