2020 Engineering graduate Luigi Mangione’s ties to Penn immediately drew attention after he was named a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO on Monday.
Mangione was charged in Manhattan with second-degree murder for the killing of Brian Thompson on Monday evening, as well as three gun charges and forgery. The charges came after Mangione was charged with five crimes in Pennsylvania not related to the CEO’s murder, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Altoona, Pa. police department.
Even as details remained sparse, a profile of him began to emerge, including that he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Penn in May 2020 while founding a gaming development club and serving as a teaching assistant for a class as an undergraduate.
Shortly after 6 p.m. on Monday evening, the Altoona police charged Mangione with forgery, carrying firearms without a license, tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of crime, and presenting false identification to authorities, according to their criminal complaint. In the days after the CEO’s murder, Mangione traveled to Philadelphia en route to Pittsburgh, officials said, though it is not clear if he was in proximity to Penn’s campus.
The criminal complaint states that at 9:14 a.m. on Monday, two police officers found Mangione in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa. wearing a blue medical mask. It further claims that Mangione provided false identification to the officers, and that he “became quiet and started to shake” after the officers asked if he had been to New York recently.
The complaint also alleges that, during a search of Mangione’s backpack, police officers found both a 3D-printed pistol and a 3D-printed black silencer.
Mangione was a computer and information science major and mathematics minor at Penn who also received a master’s degree in computer and information science from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, with a concentration in artificial intelligence. Several of the available classes for his computer and information science degrees would have involved 3D-printing instruction.
Several of Mangione’s professors and classmates from his time at Penn did not respond to requests for comment. The Daily Pennsylvanian left multiple requests for comment with individuals who claimed online to have known or interacted with Mangione during their time at Penn. A request for comment was also left with a University spokesperson.
While at the University, Mangione was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and founded Penn’s Game Research and Development Environment, also known as UPGRADE. The game development club aims to “foster creative expression and cultivate career skills for the artists, programmers, and creatives interested in game development in the Penn community.”
In a now-deleted article from Penn Today, Mangione explained that he learned how to code during his first and sophomore year of high school with the intention of programming a game, adding that it provided the impetus for his major in computer and information science. Mangione also said that, while applying to college, he noticed that several universities — but not Penn — had a student-run video game development club.
Before getting to campus for his first year, he posted in a Class of 2020 Facebook group to solicit student interest in developing games and formed the club after receiving overwhelming interest. The group’s projects included “Animancer,” a semi-open-world role-playing game, and “Aeiaton,” a science-fiction role-playing game, according to Penn Today.
Mangione presented his senior computer science design project at Penn on “CityRun: The User-friendly scenic route generation.” His group mates could not immediately be reached for comment.
The current presidents of UPGRADE and Mangione’s co-founders both did not respond to requests for comment. According to MyPenn, he lived in Harnwell and Harrison College Houses, while voter registration records indicate that he also lived at Lauder College House.
This afternoon, reporters’ knocks on the door of the Phi Kappa Psi house went unanswered, and two students who were seen leaving the house declined to comment on the matter, instead lighting cigarettes and walking away. Several current and former members of the fraternity declined requests for comment from the DP and directed requests for comment to the fraternity’s national office.
Mangione was also a teaching assistant for CIS 121: “Data Structures and Algorithms” from January 2018 to May 2019, and led the class’ Recitation Committee. In statements to the DP, two teaching assistants who worked concurrently with Mangione said that they were unfamiliar with him.
Mangione appeared to be well known on campus, as evidenced by a 2019 post in the Penn Crushes Facebook group that tagged him. It read: “Hot damn. Are you single? You make us engineers have hope!”
“Despite all my best efforts … yup still single,” Mangione replied in the comments.
In response to a request for comment, Phi Kappa Psi Executive Director Ron Ransom wrote: “We can confirm that Luigi Mangione was an undergraduate member of our chapter at the University of Pennsylvania from 2017 – 2020.”
In 2018, Mangione was inducted into Penn’s Eta Kappa Nu honor society for excellence in electrical and computer engineering. The academic honor society, which was founded in 1904, invites the top quarter of the junior class and top third of the senior class in those two majors for membership.
Mangione’s peers in Eta Kappa Nu and the current president of the society did not respond to requests for comment.
One former Penn classmate of Mangione, who requested anonymity, told CNN that Mangione was a “totally normal guy.” Another classmate reported living alongside Mangione in Honolulu after graduation.
Mangione’s account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, was suspended on Monday afternoon after surging in popularity during the day. Mangione’s Instagram account, now also deactivated, featured a number of photos alongside what appear to be brothers in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.
Mangione was also a member of the popular book website Goodreads. His account — which was set to private this afternoon — shows that he left a four-star review on domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski’s anti-technology essay “Industrial Society and its Future” in January 2024.
The essay, also known as the “Unabomber Manifesto,” was the ideological foundation for Kaczynski’s mail bomb campaign. For nearly 20 years, he targeted academics and businessmen with homemade bombs, aiming to trigger the collapse of modern society.
“[Kaczynski] was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people,” Mangione’s review reads. “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.”
After being held in custody throughout the morning, New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch identified Mangione as the department’s person of interest in the “brazen, targeted murder” of Thompson at a press conference around 1:40 p.m.
Tisch said at the press conference that officers “recovered a handwritten document that speaks to both his motivation and mindset.” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny later said that — while the department does not believe the document contains threats toward other specific individuals — “it does seem that he has some ill will toward corporate America.”
Mangione’s manifesto contained passages reading “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” according to The New York Times.
The NYPD had been leading a search for Thompson’s shooter since Wednesday, when Thompson was killed outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Police previously said that they believed the killer left the city by bus.
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