The digital footprint of Luigi Mangione, the man the police are considering a “strong person of interest” in the killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive last week, indicates that he has a background in the technology and video games industry.
Investigators are only beginning to learn about Mr. Mangione, who was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday on gun charges after a McDonald’s employee recognized him and called the authorities. His social media accounts and assorted other websites have offered a glimpse into his interests, including curiosity about self-improvement, clean eating and critiques of contemporary technology.
Mr. Mangione, 26, worked for a number of tech companies over the past 10 years, according to his LinkedIn profile and a former employer. He also maintained an active online presence on gaming platforms like Steam, and co-founded UPGRADE, the University of Pennsylvania’s first video game development club, when he was a student there.
Mr. Mangione’s interest in games started at a young age, when he began exploring the independent gaming community online, according to a now-deleted interview published to the University of Pennsylvania’s campus events blog, Penn Today, in 2018. He wanted to start creating games himself, and taught himself to code in high school.
“That’s why I’m a computer science major now, that’s how I got into it,” Mr. Mangione said in the 2018 interview. “I just really wanted to make games.”
The University of Pennsylvania did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Along with a handful of friends, Mr. Mangione started his own game development company, Approar Games, in high school, according to posts on his LinkedIn profile and social media accounts. The group published at least one app, called Pivot Plane.
Later, Mr. Mangione went to work as an intern at Firaxis Games, publisher of the enormously popular computer game franchise Civilization, according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked on the fifth installment of the game and, as part of a team of 10 people, fixed more than 300 bugs in the user interface, according to the profile.
A spokesman for Take-Two Interactive, the owner of Firaxis, confirmed that Mr. Mangione was a former employee but declined to comment further.
At a news conference on Monday, Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, described Mr. Mangione as born and raised in Maryland, with ties to San Francisco, and said he had lived in Honolulu until recently.
Mr. Mangione’s passion for games and engineering ultimately led him to pursue bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering at Penn, where he graduated in 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. He went on to work as a data engineer at TrueCar, a digital marketplace startup in Los Angeles that connects car buyers and sellers, according to the 2018 interview.
TrueCar confirmed that Mr. Mangione worked at the company, but said he has not been an employee since 2023.
In the interview with Penn Today, Mr. Mangione said he could never imagine a future in which he would no longer make games, and that he had created his college club to rally others to see the “benefits and pure fun” of making them.
“Passion is what we’re looking for,” he said.
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