Crime Weekly - S3 Ep258: Crime Weekly News: Brian Thompson Homicide Suspect Identified as Luigi Mangione

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

In the early morning of December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson was gunned down by a masked man in the streets of New York City. He was the CEO of health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, and in the aftermath of his killing, opinions on his death are fiercely divided. After a 6 day manhunt, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested for Brian's murder, and the tension in America is only rising. Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod ADS: 1. PDSDebt.com/CrimeWeekly - Get your FREE debt analysis today!

Hey everyone, welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derek Levasseur. And I'm Stephanie Harlow. And we're not going to waste any time. There was actually a lot to talk about this week in Crime Weekly News. Some weeks were like, all right, what do you want to cover? This week, there was a ton. You had the allegations against Jay-Z. You had the Daniel Penny incident with the charges being reduced there as well, or being thrown out, the manslaughter charge being thrown out. And then you also had what we're going to talk about tonight, because there have been a lot of developments very quickly. And I think it started many interesting conversations, not only based

on what happened here, but how the public is responding to it. It's very interesting. So for anybody who doesn't know, just a quick little recap here, Brian Thompson, who was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare since April of 2021, was shot and killed outside the entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, New York City on December 4th, 2024. Now, he was there to attend an annual investors meeting for the UnitedHealth group, which is the parent company of United Healthcare. So this was crazy. And when I saw this, the fact that it was caught on camera, it was being shown everywhere. And again, a lot of conversations about it. There's been many developments in it.

How do you want to structure this, Stephanie? Do you want to just go over some more details about what was found, evidence, etc.? And we'll just go through the video, all that. And then we can talk about what the recent development of the identification, which you guys know from the thumbnail. Yes. So as of December 9th, a person of interest was arrested, is being questioned. And we're going to talk about him at the end of this. We're going to come back to it and wrap around. But basically, what happened is this occurred in the early morning hours and the suspect fled the scene. I do want to talk about the public's reaction to this, but first I want to give a quick kind of timeline about what exactly happened and what we've known. So it looks like the suspect arrived in New York to the Port Authority bus terminal at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue around 10, 11 p.m. on November 24th. So they said that bus originated in Atlanta, and then the suspect got into a cab,

and that took him to the vicinity of the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel. He stayed there for about a half an hour. At 11 p.m., he took another cab to a hostel located on Amsterdam Avenue, which is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then on Friday, November 29th, the suspect checked out of the hostel. He went back and checked into the hostel again on November 30th, the following day. Now, Monday, December 2nd, that's when the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, arrived in New York.

Now, on Wednesday, December 4th, around 5.30 a.m., the suspect once again left the hostel. They believe it was by e-bike. At 5.41 a.m., he was seen wandering around the vicinity of the New York Hilton Midtown on 6th Avenue. He goes back and forth for a bit before he headed towards a Starbucks. And then at 6.17 a.m., images from that Starbucks showed him buying a bottle of water and two energy bars roughly 30 minutes before the shooting, according to law enforcement. And there's lots of surveillance footage of him. There's lots of captures. He's usually got his face pretty much hidden by a big hood that's on his jacket.

At 6.19 a.m., surveillance video near a deli on West 55th Street appears to show the suspect walking and briefly stopping by a pile of trash. He's got like a gray book bag on. Around 6.30 a.m., surveillance video captures what appears to be the gunman, and he's on the phone. He's still got his big black coat on. He's still got a gray book bag on. Is it black or like green?

It almost looks green to me. What, the coat? Yeah. It looks black to me. It could be black or like an olive green. I was seeing that that jacket actually has been flying off the shelves now. The jacket he's wearing? Yeah. That's so weird, dude. Yeah. But I think it's green. But you know what? Black blue dress. It's the black blue dress thing. Yeah. It could be like an olive green. It's dark. It's dark colored. I just have more style than you, I guess. I don't know.

I don't know. I'm not going to buy the coat, but maybe you should. So you're saying I should return it? You bought it already? No. Derek's like, it's been flying off the shelves. I know because I tried to buy it. I tried to get my size. I didn't have it. So at 6.44 a.m., Brian Thompson, the victim, he walks towards the Hilton after leaving his hotel, which was across the street. Now, at that point, the masked gunman was lying in wait outside the hotel as Thompson made his way to attend his company's annual investor conference, which apparently this was sort of a public knowledge thing. Like if you know where to look, you know to find out that they're having their annual

conference there at this hotel. Yep. I was tweeting about this. Yep, absolutely. This was very easy information to find. So the gunman then walks behind Thompson and you can see this on video. It's crazy. He shoots him in the back. He then walks towards Thompson, continues to shoot, stopping to clear a gun jam before firing again. So I had tweeted about this. I thought the video

was fascinating, but it's a very interesting thing because you see all these experts online on these different media organizations talking about it. And without calling out any agencies specifically, it's all just speculation at this point, right? We know more. And I didn't even know that someone was identified until we started recording this. Stephanie just told me. Because it just happened. It just happened, yeah. She literally was like, hey, by the way, they found someone. So here's what my observations were as a police officer and someone who is familiar with firearms. I use them all the time. Stephanie knows I have a collection. I like guns, but more for the

collection of them, but I do shoot them often. What I saw first and foremost was an individual who had some firearms training, by no means a professional, by no means an expert, because if they had been an expert, they probably would have chosen a different firearm that would have operated more easily. What I saw was more than likely a pistol with a silencer to decrease the sound, but also something of low caliber, which without getting to the details, anyone won't rifle, won't cycle through a gun properly because it doesn't have enough power behind it, which can cause like a jam or a stovepipe. A stovepipe would be when the shell casing goes to eject, it gets stuck as the slide slides back forward and it can fire another round. There's also been speculation that it could be a slide lock mechanism where it intentionally only fires one round at a time and that he knew this was going to happen, could have been true that if this was a slide lock mechanism and he had practiced with it,

the reason he was able to clear it so quickly is because he knew. Because a lot of the times when you're in law enforcement and we have new shooters, the first thing they do when they get a jam is they look at the gun. Like, what's going on? That's your natural instinct. He really didn't do that. He just cleared it and kept going. So that could have been that he knew that was going to happen or he had a familiarity with it or maybe he knew that this had happened in the past.

I'm sure he's practiced. And he practiced with it. However, something that I wanted to point out that a lot of people, even the experts, didn't, but I thought was interesting and kind of put a slash on the side of he's not a professional, not someone who has a lot of experience. When you're shooting a gun for the first time, we are relatively for your first time, there's something called anticipation.

And what happens is you're anticipating the recoil of the firearm and you're countering that. It's your human nature. So what happens, and I apologize for people on audio, picture me holding up the gun and I have it up on screen if you're watching here. And what you do right as you're pulling the trigger is you go like this, you kind of jerk it forward and you jerk it down. And so it offsets that recoil. And what happens is your first shot is usually low. His first shot appears to me to hit him in the thigh or the calf, which suggests some level of anticipation. So I left this video thinking more than likely, this is someone who may have shot a gun before,

but didn't necessarily have an expertise with it. Not like a military or law enforcement background. This wasn't, in my opinion, from that video, a professional hit. And you're going to go on in the timeline about where he went after this and all that stuff, which I think indicates that even more. But the fact that they chose to do it right there in public. Yeah, I thought there's a pedestrian standing right there. It's super brazen. Cameras everywhere in New York City.

I mean, like maybe six, 10 feet away from Brian Thompson, there's a woman standing with her back to the shooter. Yeah, but still very brazen. Here's the thing about a professional hit. And this might not be a spoiler alert for a lot of you guys. If it's a professional hit, you're not going to know it was a professional hit. You're not going to.

Yeah, it's like a ghost. It comes off as a suicide or an accident. Or you just, or you never even just saw any, any mention of this person. Nobody knows anything. This was very, this was very careless. And it seemed like the person had a, a story they wanted to tell. Yeah. They wanted it to be known. Well, with the shell casings on the shell casings that were found, it was written delay and deny. And it's a common phrase in the insurance industry to say delay, deny, defend, which is horrible. Horrible that that's the practice. Delay, deny, defend of people who are sick and need help. personal not professional and there was also some people out there that suggested this was a 3d printed gun something like they made at home something that when you make it on when you make it your own way it may not fire correctly because it's plastic or a high strain like carbon fiber or something so a lot of speculation about this everyone has an opinion on it and at this point

my only takeaway was more than likely this is someone with an ax to grind, a familiarity with guns, but not necessarily a hired hit. That was my takeaway from the video. Definitely planned. Definitely intentional. 1,000%. So he shoots, right? It's crazy to see it, by the way. It's such a clear surveillance video too, right? It seems like a movie when you're by the way. It's such a clear surveillance video too, right? It seems like a movie when you're watching a movie. It's hard for the brain to process that what you're watching is something that happened to a real person. But after the shooting, the suspect crosses the street from the Hilton. He fled northbound through an alley,

and he then got an electric bike on 55th Street before heading north on 6th Avenue towards Central Park. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Okay, so now around 6.46 a.m., 911 responds to Brian Thompson being shot on the street. They arrive to find him on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. He's got gunshot wounds to his back and his leg. He's taken to the hospital. At 6.48, at that exact same time, the suspect is seen riding an electric bike into Central Park at 60th Street. He rides out of the park at 6.56. And at 7 a.m., he's no longer on the bike, but he is then, again, walking northbound on 86th Street, and then he gets into a cab at 7.04. Thompson's pronounced dead at the hospital at 7.12 a.m.

At 7.30 a.m., the suspect is seen near the George Washington Bridge and a Port Authority bus terminal off 178th Street. So he's getting out of town, right? They said they don't have any, they have video of him entering the station. They don't have video of him exiting. So obviously they believe he got on a bus. Then on December 6th, the NYPD found a backpack in Central Park that they believe belonged to the suspect. So obviously they sent it for testing. And for a long time, that was all we knew. But now, just today, just this afternoon, we have somebody who's been arrested and taken into custody, and it is a University of Pennsylvania graduate named Luigi Mangione.

This is a 26-year-old man who was being questioned in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and the sources that we have from this NBC article say that customers at a McDonald's in that area called police after spotting Mangione, who they deemed suspicious. Now, apparently, this dude's got a ton of fake IDs. I'm reading four. Four fake IDs. Yeah. When he was arrested, they discovered a gun similar to the one used in Brian Thompson's killing as well as a silencer and a fake New Jersey ID with the name Mark Rosario on it.

So this is most likely how he checked into the hostel, how he got his bus tickets, things like that. So he's not going to, and the great thing is though, because he traveled under assumed names, it would have been very difficult to track him to who he actually was, but because there's so much surveillance video of him,

we did get some captures of his face. Yeah, Starbucks, they had the full, full shot of his face from Starbucks. But then, and then all these eyewitnesses were able to call police when they saw him. I mean, I will say this, looking at the mask photos of him in the back of the taxi and then the Starbucks image, now looking at a picture of him on my screen right now, it looks like him to me, especially the eyebrows, The eyebrows really give it away. Oh, I definitely believe that this is the same person. Yeah, just on physical appearance. Not known motive yet, but yeah.

But it's weird because it's not the type of person you would think would do something like this, right? He was born and raised in Maryland. He was a graduate from Gilman High School in 2016. He was a valedictorian. This was an all boys school in Baltimore, Maryland. They believe he attended college in Pennsylvania. It's really not something, someone specifically that you would think would randomly be killing a multimillionaire CEO. However, because of, like you said, the shell casings, the bullets, because of who Brian Thompson was, because of how, am I going to say it? What he represented.

How shitty any healthcare companies in the United States are. They're absolutely horrendous. Crooks. For sure. Absolute crooks. Yeah. Multi-billion dollar industry. People are dying. They insure 49 million Americans and they had $281 billion in revenue

from the 2023 fiscal year. We know that under Thompson's leadership, UnitedHealthcare began using AI to automate claim denials. And this resulted in patients being unable to access their needed medical care. That, by the way, they pay out the ass for. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. They want you to pay for it. And then when you need it, they're nowhere to be found. Oh, they want you to pay for it. And you do pay for it. But if you need it, whoa, you didn't read the fine print. And like I said, Derek and I were talking a little bit before we started recording. We've all seen John Q. It's one of my favorite movies. And like I said, wait, Derek and I were talking a little bit before we started recording.

We've all seen John Q. It's one of my favorite movies. Denzel Washington is my favorite actor of all time. I can understand somebody having a, not just a dislike for these insurance companies, but if you or a family member or a loved one has been affected negatively, and people die. People, well-insured, fully-insured people die because of not having access to the medical care they need. A technicality in their coverage. And this happens so much.

Yeah. Okay, so I can see somebody who maybe had been affected by one of these healthcare companies, negatively affected, having a vendetta like this. Yeah. And it's most likely what we're dealing with here. Listen, not even at this scale, but I had to have surgery in a couple of months for a hernia and I went to have a MRI. To make a long story short, because of what I needed, the type of MRI I needed, it wasn't covered. Nope, it's not. I'm a healthy person, never have it. Cost me almost

$2,000 that I had to pay out of pocket just to have an MRI done to confirm the hernia. And it was because something that I had, an extra thing that I needed that wasn't covered under this policy that I have. And I thought to myself, even then, it's like I pay thousands of dollars in insurance every month. And yet when I need it, there's always a reason why they can't cover it, or most of it's not covered. It's a crime. It really is. Now, let's talk about how the general public,

and when I say the general public, I mean the majority of people have reacted to this case. Before you do that, can I ask one more question? Was there anything, because I'm seeing a couple things here that he might have had a manifesto on him. Yeah, they did say that a few sources said that he had a manifesto on him when he was arrested. Okay, because I don't know how true this is. This is all new. It hasn't been confirmed as of now. It hasn't been confirmed, but from what I'm

seeing, just to put it out there as what we're talking about right now, allegedly, allegedly, he had two grandparents that there's obituaries that were found for them. He lost his grandmother and his grandfather in 2013 and in 2017. And they're thinking that may somehow be connected to this. Again, that information is subject to change. But based on everything we're saying right now, there's your potential motive. Based on what those grandparents went through, maybe he really all this time was thinking, this isn't right. I want to make a change. I want to do something. And now to your point about how the country is receiving this

story and how they're interpreting it. It's such a tough thing because I understand where the outrage comes from. I do. And I don't necessarily disagree with it. I don't know. You don't disagree with the outrage or the assassination? Oh, I don't disagree with the outrage. I know what you were saying. I wanted to make sure we clarified that. Yeah. I am somebody that's very much like murder is never the answer kind of thing. But also, as an average citizen, when you're battling a multi-billion dollar company like this, obviously we know that's not possible. What are you going to do? Bring them to

court? They're going to keep you, they got more money than you, they're going to keep you in court forever, nothing's ever going to come of it. There really isn't a non-violent way to handle this. But do I agree with handling it in a violent way? Not necessarily. However, we do have a lot of public response, which is celebrations, joking about it. And that really does make me feel really poorly for Brian Thompson's surviving family, his wife, his kids, things like that. Where I do draw the line is where we have people who are just legitimately calling for more of it, right? So there's a journalist, Taylor Lorenz. She had reposted the photo of another health insurance company CEO with a blank section for a day of death accompanied by a caption pondering about whether to send your next to other CEOs who are in the same industry.

And later she's like, oh, I was just explaining what the public sentiment was. I wasn't like calling for violence, but. Yeah. You kind of were, okay? Because you know, in general, when things are simmering like this, that's probably not the thing you wanna do.

Once again, understand where the anger comes from. I don't know, it's very difficult. Like I'm all about the people rising up. But if you took to the streets in general, en masse, hundreds of thousands of people all over the United States and started speaking out against this, started boycotting, started making noise about it, which I don't believe has ever really been done on a large scale, maybe that would send a message, right? You know, maybe you start there. You start with resistance.

You start with nonviolent resistance and then see where it goes from there. And I don't know if there's ever been a huge sort of movement of that type for healthcare companies or against healthcare companies. So I probably want to start there. But yeah, it's very hard to watch because you agree and you're on the same page as these people. You agree with the premise. Yeah, but I'm also not going to be out there celebrating anybody's death. It's just not in my nature to do that. So you guys know where I'm going to land on this one. I've said it on numerous cases and I've said it with like, even with more extreme examples

like the Menendez brothers and Gypsy Rose, where you just can't, you can't be judge, jury, executioner. We can't condone that type of behavior because it's going to become the wild west. Because where does it stop? Is it the CEO? Is it the VP? Is it the person processing your order? The guy who made your coffee wrong? Yeah, we just start killing people when we disagree with their, even though the majority of the country disagrees with it. Of course.

It's such a weird place because you have people, we were talking about it before the recording, you have the lookalike contest being done in New York right now. And like they were doing with Timothee Chalamet and stuff like they're treating this guy like a celebrity. They're treating him like a yeah, like a hero, like a hero. And by the way, because we know media, I'm looking at pictures of this kid. Very good looking dude. Oh, he's handsome. He's very handsome.

Great smile. He's smart. Good looking. It's already going to be happening online. There's going to be girls fawning over this guy. He is going to be a hero. I can't believe I'm forgetting the name of Sarnayoff, the bomber from the Boston Marathon, the kid who was caught.

Oh, Sarnoff? Whatever his name is, you guys know they put him on the cover of Rolling Stone. And this kid makes that guy look like Pee Wee Herman. This kid's a very good looking guy. But as far as the premise, yeah, we can't be killing people. And, you know, it's so funny because before they identified this guy, I was just reading this article because this video came up on my feed. I don't know if you're familiar with this name, Stephanie, Marianne Bachmeier. Do you know the name? Not off the top of my head. No. Unbelievable. It happened in Germany. And I can't remember exactly when it happened. I think it was

in the 1980s. But basically, some guy kidnapped her daughter, Anna, raped and murdered her. Okay. There's a video of it. You got to look it up after this crazy video, walks into the courtroom with a trench coat on, pulls out a gun, shoots him six or seven times in the chest. Boom, done. Now I gotta be honest, my natural reaction, badass, badass. And you know what? I've talked about this before. Cause you guys say, sometimes we talk out of both sides of our mouths. Like we're not condoning it, but it, but if you're going to do it, I mean, rapists and murderers and child molesters, you know, that that's the one that I feel the least bad about. Um, but we can't start shooting CEOs of insurance companies. We can't do that.

And I will say with Marianne Bachmeier, cause there's really no comparison in my eyes. That's her daughter. And she knew exactly what she was doing. She didn't run from it. She walked right into the courtroom. There was no mask. We don't want to create a precedent where we have people going out there like this guy, Luigi, and just killing the people that they disagree with because it just, it's going to, it's never going to end well. And I will say one thing that you brought up before we started recording. And I think you got to mention it here and not that we were hoping for this, but you were telling me before we started recording that the processing of insurance claims has like doubled or tripled. What were you saying?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's I forget how much is exactly it is. But in the days since the the murder assassination, whatever you want to call it, health care companies have been approving far more claims than they were before. Crazy, crazy. But it kind of also like sends a message of, hey, this worked. Yes. It's bad.

It's real bad. And I was just watching... But it's all bad what the insurance companies do. So it's like, whose side are we on? I don't even know. I was watching this hearing, judicial hearing or whatever it was, a Congress hearing that they had about MasterCard and Visa and how they take advantage of people. They're like 50% interest rates and shit, like just basically robbing people who need help.

That's even a little different, though, because people don't necessarily need credit cards. I agree, but I'm just saying in general, where does it stop? Where does it stop? Does the person who lost their house because they couldn't pay their bills go after the CEO of MasterCard? That's the point I'm trying to make. You can't. There's no gray area. You can't go after.

Brian Thompson may have been a bad guy, may have been a good guy. We don't know. But I can promise you he wasn't the guy processing the individual claim for Luigi's family. So to go after him. He's the one that put in this AI thing that just automatically denies claims for like zero reason. So do we take out the AI designers and all them too? Do we kill everybody?

You know, that's my point. You can't, you can't go there. I feel bad for Brian's family that he didn't deserve that. I, he didn't, I don't care if people agree with it or not. Well, his that he didn't deserve that. He didn't. I don't care if people agree with it or not. Well, his family certainly doesn't deserve it. I do agree that there has to be a change in the system. And we can't take it back now.

It happened. And I only hope that the silver lining here is that it does create a sense of urgency and a new awareness to how corrupt the insurance companies are. And maybe because of this tragedy, there is change. I mean, that's what you can hope for now, that this loss of life will cause a positive change for millions of Americans. Yes, that's the hope. And I didn't want it to come this way, but maybe with this, Congress and everybody else now

will get off their hands and knees for these insurance companies because they have the lobbyists out there and they're funding their campaigns. And so whenever you try to go through the legal process, it always goes away because politicians on both sides of the aisle are being paid to just shut up and look the other way. Period. So that's really all we have, right? We'll see what happens with this one. Again, the identification just happened hours ago before we started recording. So we'll see how this all plays out. I'm going to be very interested in seeing how the public reacts to Luigi. I have a feeling it's going to be very positive. That's just my opinion.

I think there's going to be a lot of TikToks and social media surrounding him and a lot of people putting him on a pedestal. They already are. There's going to be t-shirts with his face all over them. I get it. What would be a tragedy is if everything goes back to normal in a few weeks and the health insurance companies continue on as they are, and then this just reaches a point where the public, which I don't get why the government, by the way, the government and these private companies that screw you over, why they're not more afraid? Because we've got kind of like a strength in numbers kind of thing. And although our country is incredibly divided right now, things like this will bring them together. And that's when these politicians and these big businessmen that take advantage of you, that's when they really need to be afraid.

There is this kind of unifying factor behind this, isn't there, where they're not condoning or congratulating Luigi on the killing. Both sides of the aisle are kind of like, I sort of see why this happened. Like surprise this didn't happen sooner. Yeah. You know, and we just, in our country, whether you agree with a lot, a lot of people have access to guns and it doesn't take, one person can have this type of effect on an entire population. So we'll see how it plays out. It's going to be long-term effects.

I do think there will be changes. I think this is a wake-up call. There needs to be changes because the fact of the matter is these companies, along with the government and with help from the government, have created a place where making and keeping people sick puts money in their pockets. And making health, which is such a blessing, such a blessing. You have the biggest advantage over money, over anything, if you have your health. Making something like health a capitalistic way to just get billions of dollars while people die and suffer,

that was never a good structure for a business. So hopefully they will change that. They're gonna lose money, but, and maybe they don't care. Maybe they just want to keep making money and nothing will change. And then where are we going to go from there? I don't know, but I don't think that people are going to sit quietly anymore. No, it doesn't appear that way. So we'll see what happens here. We'll be following it. Our thoughts are with Brian's family and obviously Luigi's family as well, because now they're going to be affected by this. And Luigi, if he is responsible for this and based on what we know and how much evidence they have, he may, he more than likely is going to spend the rest of his life in a prison. But I don't

think he's opposed to that. I think we're going to find out based on the manifesto and the way he left little breadcrumbs behind and he didn't do a great job of kind of covering up his identity. I think we're going to find out that he had made a decision prior to the shooting that he was okay with that. If I get caught, they're going to know why I did this. They're going to know why I did it and I'm going to represent something in this life. I'm going to try not to get caught. I'm going to try not to, but if I do, it's going to represent something bigger than myself and it's for people that I don't even know. So we'll see how it plays out that's going to do it for us guys uh we're going to be back later this week with

karen reed part four it's a long one so get ready for it uh until then everyone stay safe out there and we'll see you soon bye