Luigi Mangione was born into a prosperous Maryland family that owned country clubs, nursing homes and a conservative talk radio station.
He attended a private, all-boys high school in the Baltimore suburbs. There, he played sports, taught himself to code, developed an app for flying a paper airplane through obstacles and was the valedictorian in 2016.
Next came the University of Pennsylvania, where he excelled academically, joined a fraternity, helped start a game-development club and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. His career goal was to make video games.
Friends described him as intelligent, thoughtful, considerate, friendly and ambitious. His friends and online activity suggest he read avidly and was interested in topics such as what he considered the greed of corporations, the impact on society of declining birthrates, and the negative effects of social media.
His activity on those platforms suggested he struggled mentally and physically. In Reddit posts, he wrote of a worsening “brain fog” that had begun in high school and had hurt his grades and his ability to focus in college. He also complained about chronic back pain. Later, a surfing injury would make that worse, too.
After college, he had internships and jobs with several tech companies, including as a software engineer at TrueCar, an online marketplace based in Santa Monica, Calif., until sometime in 2023. He spent about six months living in Honolulu at a so-called co-living space that catered to remote workers.
He had back surgery in July 2023. It appeared to be successful. By Day 7 of his recovery, he wrote later that summer, he was taking “literally zero pain meds.”
In his writings, Mr. Mangione appeared to feel strongly about the U.S. health care system, although it is not clear if his opinions were based on his back pain or his personal dealings with that system.
In early 2024, with the surgery behind him, he embarked on a backpacking trip to Asia that included stops in Tokyo, Bangkok, and at a spiritual sanctuary in the Nara Mountains of Japan.
The trip eventually led him to Mumbai, where he met with a writer who shared Mr. Mangione’s interest in Ted Kaczynski, the mathematician known as the Unabomber whose nearly 20-year bombing spree killed three people and injured 23 others.
In conversations, a journal entry and a social media post, Mr. Mangione expressed a fascination with Mr. Kaczynski, who believed that modern-day technology was harmful to individual freedom and the natural environment, and had led to widespread human suffering.
In one instance, Mr. Mangione wrote that Mr. Kaczynski had been “rightfully imprisoned” for his violent acts. But in January 2024, in a review of a book containing Mr. Kaczynski’s rambling manifesto that he posted on Goodreads, a social media site for bookworms, Mr. Mangione wrote that “it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”
By that July, he had returned to the United States and settled in San Francisco.
“I finally feel confident about what I will do,” he wrote in a journal entry in August. “The details are finally coming together. And I don’t feel any doubt about whether it’s right/justified.”
Soon he had stopped posting on his known social media accounts and had stopped responding to messages from relatives and friends. His mother filed a missing person’s report with the San Francisco police on Nov. 18.
Just over two weeks later, on Dec. 4, a masked man fatally shot Brian Thompson, the chief executive of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare, outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel in what amounted to a public execution.
Five days later, Mr. Mangione was arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s and charged with the killing.
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