The suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson went missing and cut off contact with family and friends last month after undergoing back surgery, it has emerged.
Luigi Mangione, 26, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and charged with murder over the “targeted” shooting of the healthcare executive in Manhattan on December 4.
While the motive for the attack is still under investigation, new details are emerging about Mangione’s own health issues – and the impact they appear to have had on his life.
The Ivy League college graduate suffered from debilitating, chronic back pain and underwent major surgery for it in 2023, a friend told The New York Times.
RJ Martin – a friend of Mangione and spokesperson of Surfbreak, a co-living space in Honolulu, where Mangione lived for about six months until April 2022 – told the newspaper that Mangione had moved to Hawaii in a bid to get as healthy as possible in advance of the operation.
“His spine was kind of misaligned,” Martin said. “He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve. Sometimes he’d be doing well and other times not.”
The injury hampered Mangione’s ability to surf and also took a toll on his romantic life, Martin said.
After taking one surf lesson, Martin recalled to CNN that Mangione ended up “in bed for about a week” with back pain.
Mangione also once sent him a photo of an X-ray of his back, which Martin said looked “looked heinous, with just giant screws going into his spine.”
A photo on Mangione’s X account, which has since been taken down, shows an X-ray photo of a spine with four pins in it. It is not clear if the X-ray is of the 26-year-old.
The murder suspect’s Goodreads account also shows five books involving chronic back pain on his reading list including:Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery, and Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease―and How to Fight It.
The reading list also included a raft of books related to alternative medicine and psychedelics and linked to a handwritten note detailing his workout routine and stating that he was suffering from spondylolisthesis, CNN reported.
Spondylolisthesis is a condition that causes vertebra to slip or shift forward onto the vertebra below.
It often occurs in the lower back and those with a high-grade slip are more likely to experience “significant pain” and “nerve injury” and need surgery to relieve symptoms, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.
Mangione is said to have undergone surgery in 2023.
Months later, Mangione lost touch with friends and relatives, according to police sources, accounts from his friends and social media posts.
Just two weeks before Thompson’s murder, Mangione’s mother, Kathleen Mangione, reported him missing to the San Francisco Police Department on November 18, a police source told the San Francisco Standard. He was born and raised in Maryland and has ties to San Francisco and a last known address in Honolulu, police said.
Former high school classmate Aaron Cranston told The New York Times Mangione’s family had reached out to some of his friends to see if they knew where he was, saying that they had not seen or heard from him for months after his surgery.
In the months before the shooting, several friends had also posted messages to him on X seemingly concerned and trying to contact him.
“Nobody has heard from you in months,” one person posted in October.
“I don’t know if you are okay or just in a super isolated place and have no service. But I haven’t heard from you in months,” another from July read.
Mangione was arrested Monday after a McDonald’s employee called police after recognizing him from images of the suspect circulated by the NYPD last week.
The suspect was in possession of a ghost gun, a suppressor, “multiple fraudulent IDs,” and a handwritten manifesto that allegedly slammed the healthcare system at the time of his arrest, police said.
Mangione’s family said in a statement they were “shocked and devastated” by the arrest and offered their “prayers to the family of Brian Thompson.”
The suspect was due to appear in a Pennsylvania court late on Tuesday for a hearing on whether he can be taken to New York to face murder charges there.