Luigi Mangione, 26, a suspect in the New York City killing of UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson, arrives for his arraignment. — Reuters
Before Monday, Luigi Mangione's social media posts from a summer in the Bay Area were relatively quiet. The pictures showed the young man at SFMOMA, on the Stanford Dish Trail and posing with apparent university co-workers. There were some likes, an occasional comment.
Then, those Facebook and Instagram posts became hotbeds for the white-hot discourse revolving around the Dec 4 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – to the extent that the Meta-owned Bay Area tech companies have now pulled the pages offline.
On Monday morning, police arrested Mangione in connection with the New York City shooting, which sparked waves of national discourse about the health care industry and political violence. New York police said in a Monday press conference that an employee at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognised the 26-year-old Mangione from photos and called in authorities.
"At this time, he is believed to be our person of interest in the brazen, targeted murder," NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. She added that police had recovered a firearm and suppressor consistent with the killing weapon, along with a fake ID matching that of the one used by the masked and hooded shooting suspect at a New York hostel.
NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said in the press conference that police recovered a document from Mangione that made it seem as if he harboured "some ill will toward corporate America."
Every fact and rumour about this case has been broadly chronicled online since last week's shooting – reports that the suspect was caught on camera because he flirted with a hostel receptionist, the health care-related "deny," "defend," "depose" engravings found on the ammunition, even the attractiveness of the suspect seen in photos. So it's no surprise that, after the NYPD shared Mangione's name, his public presence became the newest object of the Internet's hyperactive attention. SFGATE checked the pages continuously in reporting this article; the Instagram and Facebook accounts became unavailable around 2.15pm Pacific time.
Mangione's last Instagram post was from 2021; as of Monday at 2.15pm, he had 64,000 followers, after gaining thousands every hour. He only had 10 posts, but each was suddenly flooded with thousands of likes. Hundreds of comments rained in, the majority with supportive tones – some comments praised Mangione's appearance, others rephrased Internet memes or advocated for his freedom.
One of his photo slideshows, from August 2019, opened with a picture of him and others in Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies shirts. His apparent LinkedIn page says he was a head counselor and artificial intelligence teaching assistant for the program. In other photos in the slideshow, he ran on a beach and held a Lion King McDonald's Happy Meal next to his head. The post had 274 comments as of 2.15pm.
His Facebook album, "Stanford Summer 2019," had 3,800 comments as of 2.15pm. Comments there were more mixed than on Instagram, with many making fun of Mangione or cheering the idea of him going to jail. Some support arrived there too, including with memes related to the ammunition engravings and a much-liked comment about a hypothetical defense fund.
Intrigued reporters also found what appeared to be Mangione's Goodreads account, which has since been locked but featured a January review of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future. Mangione apparently wrote: "It's easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out." – SFGate, San Francisco/Tribune News Service
