Luigi Mangione, 26, the man who was taken into custody Monday morning in Altoona, Pa., and identified as a suspect in the killing of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in Midtown Manhattan last Wednesday, appears to have been a well-educated and well-traveled enthusiast of computer programming and gaming with an interest in self-improvement.
Mr. Mangione grew up in Maryland, according to Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives with the New York City Police Department.
He attended high school at the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he was an athlete and displayed a keen interest in developing video games. According to an interview that was published on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus events blog, Penn Today, in 2018 and that has now been deleted, Mr. Mangione taught himself to code in high school. He and a group of friends then started a game development company, Approar Games, according to posts on his LinkedIn profile and social media accounts.
He was the valedictorian of his graduating class in 2016. In a graduation speech, he described his class as “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it.”
He thanked parents in attendance for sending him and his classmates to the school, which he described as “far from a small financial investment.” Tuition at Gilman is currently $37,690 per year for high schoolers.
Mr. Mangione then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-founded a game development club. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and Eta Kappa Nu, an academic honor society for students in electrical and computer engineering, and graduated with both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in engineering.
Stanford University confirmed that a Luigi Mangione worked as a head counselor in its Pre-Collegiate Studies program in 2019.
Mr. Mangione also had an internship at Firaxis Games, the publisher of the enormously popular computer game franchise Civilization. He went on to work as a data engineer at TrueCar, a digital marketplace start-up in Los Angeles that connects car buyers and sellers. TrueCar said he had not been an employee since 2023.
Mr. Mangione’s family is prosperous, thanks to real estate holdings and a chain of senior rehabilitation centers.
Chief Kenny said Mr. Mangione had lived in San Francisco and Honolulu and had no known criminal record in New York City. In fact, the only criminal activity that seems linked to Mr. Mangione is a citation for trespassing in Hawaii.
In recent months, Mr. Mangione appeared to maintain accounts on social media platforms including Facebook, X, Instagram and Goodreads, where he shared quotations, reviewed books he had read and reflected on algorithms, self-help texts and guides to touring Hawaii.
On X, Mr. Mangione frequently reposted content from a handful of well-known writers and academics, many of whom focus on self-improvement or the negative health consequences of modern consumption.
On Goodreads, a book review website, earlier this year, he gave four stars to “Industrial Society and Its Future,” better known as the Unabomber manifesto, by Ted Kaczynski, and described the writer as a “mathematics prodigy.”
“He was a violent individual — rightfully imprisoned — who maimed innocent people,” Mr. Mangione wrote in his review. “While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
Posts on social media from before Mr. Mangione was apprehended indicate that he may have fallen out of touch with some of his circle. Former classmates said they had heard that he had been out of contact with his peers after suffering a spinal injury last year and having surgery, and that Mr. Mangione’s family had been trying to track him down for several months.
A handwritten manifesto found with Mr. Mangione on Monday mentions UnitedHealthcare by name, noting the size of the company and how much money it makes, and also broadly condemns health care companies for placing profits over care, according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. The official quoted it as saying, “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
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