The person of interest nabbed in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is an anti-capitalist Ivy League grad who liked online quotes from “Unabomber’’ Ted Kaczynski — and apparently hated the medical community because of how it treated his sick relative, law-enforcement sources told The Post on Monday.
Tech whiz Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Md., has not been charged but was taken into custody Monday morning at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., after an intense manhunt following the coldblooded execution of Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel last week, sources said.
The former prep-school valedictorian was caught with a gun, silencer, four fake IDs with names used during the killer’s stint in New York City — and a manifesto, sources said.
The manifesto railed against the US healthcare industry, including over its enormous profits and alleged shady motives, sources said.
Mangione had a particularly personal reason to hate the medical community — its treatment of an ailing relative, sources said.
Online obituaries show he lost a grandmother in 2013 and grandfather in 2017.
His LinkedIn page indicates that he once worked in an assisted-living facility for the elderly for a few months in 2014, while still in high school.
The shooter is believed to have acted alone. It is unclear if Mangione has yet made any statements to cops.
Mangione also subscribed to anti-capitalist and climate-change causes, according to law-enforcement sources, citing online activity gleaned by authorities.
On the Goodreads website, Mangione’s account shows quotes he particularly likes ranging from Socrates to Bruce Lee — to wacky anti-establishment Kaczynski, the infamous “Unabomber’’ who terrorized the country for nearly two decades by dispatching deadly bombs before he was nabbed in 1996.
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness,’’ Kaczynski wrote at one point in a quote liked by Mangione.
“Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.’’
Mangione was valedictorian of his 2016 high school graduating class at the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he played soccer, according to online sites. High school tuition at the all-boys school is nearly $40,000 a year.
He said at the time of graduation that he planned to seek a degree in artificial intelligence, focused on the areas of computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, according to an interview with the Baltimore Fishbowl.
He says in online posts that he graduated from the prestigious school with a master’s of science in engineering and a bachelor’s degree in the same field.
His LinkedIn suggests he is a data engineer at a car company based in California, although he lists his current home as Honolulu in Hawaii.
The state of the country’s government and economy were apparently on his mind for years.
He reposted a Wall Street Journal article on Facebook in 2019 titled, “Obstacle to Deficit Cutting: A Nation on Entitlements.”
His Facebook account, which did not have any recent postings, says he is the co-founder of AppRoar Studios, which describes itself as “an app development start-up founded to provide the simplest and most engaging gaming experience.”
While at Penn, Mangione appeared in an article in a student publication that praised him for starting up a student-run video game development club. The club is now known as the University of Pennsylvania Game Research and Development Environment.
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