How suspect on the run in CEO’s killing was recognized at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, hash brown in hand, and finally captured

CNN

By Ray Sanchez and John Miller, CNN

(CNN) — The regulars began assembling in the predawn Monday at a McDonald’s just off the interstate in western Pennsylvania when at some point a fellow customer caught their attention.

“Don’t that look like the shooter from New York?” one of the regulars, who only gave his first name, Larry, recalled his friend joking.

“He probably heard us,” Larry said of the man seated maybe 10 feet away in the back, near the restrooms of the fast-food restaurant in Altoona.

All joking aside, Larry’s friend was correct: That man turned out to be the wanted fugitive suspected of calmly pulling out a pistol with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and gunning down the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in a brazen assassination that gripped the nation.

Luigi Mangione, 26, sat alone at a table with a laptop and a backpack, according to police who arrested him at McDonald’s. He was wearing a medical mask, a brown beanie and a dark jacket. An image shared on social media by the Pennsylvania State Police showed Mangione, his blue mask dangling from his ear, eating what appeared to be a hash brown.

The scion of a wealthy Baltimore family who was a high school valedictorian and an Ivy League graduate was in Pennsylvania for several days, police said, after allegedly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last Wednesday outside a Manhattan hotel about 230 miles from Altoona.

In the end, New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said, a “combination of old-school detective work and new-age technology” led to the capture of a suspect. The fatal shooting outside an investors’ conference sparked an exhaustive search, with New York police combing the city for evidence and poring through thousands of hours of video footage.

Various images – from his stop at a Manhattan Starbucks before the shooting to a surveillance camera shot of him with his face uncovered and a broad smile below his distinctive dark eyes and eyebrows at an Upper West Side hostel where he stayed – were nationally circulated in the five days since the shooting.

“There’s numerous linchpins in this case, and the fact that we’ve recovered an enormous amount of forensic evidence, an enormous amount of video,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters. “I really couldn’t put it on one thing, but if I had to, it would be the release of that photograph” of the suspect’s exposed face.

Suspect ‘became quiet and started to shake’

At the McDonald’s on East Plank Road off Interstate 99, a customer alerted an employee, who called police Monday morning to say they believed the suspect was there.

About 9:15 a.m., a pair of officers found the man “wearing a medical mask and a beanie” sitting “in the rear of the building at a table,” looking at a laptop, according to a criminal complaint. There was a backpack on the floor near the table. They asked him to pull down his mask.

Altoona Police Officer Tyler Frye and his partner “immediately recognized him,” the complaint said.

“We didn’t even think twice about it,” Frye, who has about six months on the job, told reporters after the arrest. “We knew that was our guy.”

The officers asked the man for identification. He handed them a New Jersey ID with the name Mark Rosario, the complaint said.

When they asked whether he had been to New York City recently, he “became quiet and started to shake,” according to the complaint.

Police checked and found no records that matched the ID. When they told the man he was under a police investigation, he gave officers his real name: Luigi Mangione. Asked why he had used a false name, the suspect replied, “I clearly shouldn’t have,” according to the complaint.

Police found “a black 3D-printed pistol” with a loaded Glock magazine and a “black silencer” that was also 3D-printed in his backpack, according to the criminal complaint. Tisch told reporters that Mangione was found with a gun and a suppressor “both consistent with the weapon used in the murder,” referring to a device that muffles the sound of a firearm.

The “fraudulent New Jersey ID,” Tisch said, matched “the ID our suspect used to check into his New York City hostel before the shooting.” She said he was also carrying “a handwritten document that speaks to both his motivation and mindset.”

The document, which has also been described as the suspect’s “manifesto,” did not include specific threats but indicated “ill will towards corporate America,” Kenny told reporters.

“These parasites had it coming,” one line from the document reads, according to a police official who has seen it.

“I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” another line reads. The document indicated the suspect acted alone and that he was self-funded, according to Kenny.

The suspect also appeared to refer to UnitedHealthcare in the document, describing “United” as one of the largest companies by market capitalization in the United States, according to a law enforcement source who has read the document. There was no mention of Thompson specifically.

Mangione appeared to be driven by anger against the health insurance industry and against “corporate greed” as a whole, according to an NYPD intelligence report obtained by CNN.

“He appeared to view the targeted killing of the company’s highest-ranking representative as a symbolic takedown and a direct challenge to its alleged corruption and ‘power games,’ asserting in his note he is the ‘first to face it with such brutal honesty,’” reads the assessment, which is based on the three-page handwritten manifesto found on the suspect as well as Mangione’s social media posts.

After the shooting, the suspect had traveled between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, making stops in between, before his capture on Monday, according to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

New York prosecutors have charged Mangione with murder, two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, one count of second-degree possession of a forged document and one count of third-degree criminal possession of a firearm.

On Monday, Mangione made his first court appearance in Pennsylvania. As a judge read the entire criminal complaint out loud to him, Mangione verbally pushed back against the prosecution’s claim that $8,000 in cash found on him meant that he was trying to evade authorities. He said he did not know where the money came from, and suggested that maybe it was planted.

A day later, as police escorted him from their vehicle to the courthouse in Pennsylvania for an extradition hearing on Tuesday, Mangione could be heard yelling in part, “It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people. It’s lived experience!”

His attorney, Thomas Dickey, said his client will fight his extradition. Shackled at the hands and feet and wearing an orange jumpsuit with DOC emblazoned on the back, Mangione was escorted by officers out of court after being denied bail.

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CNN’s Ashley R. Williams, Gloria Pazmino, Mark Morales, Brynn Gingras, Dakin Andone, Zoe Scottie, Karina Tsui, Danny Freeman, Elise Hammond, Melanie Hicken, Blake Ellis, and Brian Todd contributed to this report.