A masked killer, a ghost gun, and a six-day manhunt that ended in a McDonald’s

It was not DNA or facial recognition technology that solved the case. Nor did amateur online investigators looking for clues uncover it.

Ultimately, it was an employee of a McDonald’s restaurant – which was a few hours away from the crime scene – who spotted a man resembling the photo of a “person of interest.”

The suspect was careful to wear a mask while traveling in New York City, but he pulled the mask down for a second to flirt with a woman behind a desk at a youth hostel and then eat at McDonald’s.

Maybe this is enough.

Police in Altoona, Pennsylvania raided the restaurant and arrested Luigi Mangione, 26, from a wealthy Baltimore-area family with an expensive private and Ivy League education.

After six dramatic days, the search for the man suspected of shooting UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson is over.

On Monday morning, a regular at a McDonald’s in Altoona told the BBC that a friend of his saw Mr Mangione enter the restaurant and commented: “There’s that shooter from New York”.

The customer said, “I thought he was joking.”

Police were called and when officers first approached Mr. Mangione and asked him if he was in New York, he was “obviously nervous, trembling,” Altoona Deputy Chief Derrick Swope told reporters.

As he was being led to a court hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Mangione screamed about “an insult to the American people and their lived experience.”

He is now charged with weapons crimes as well as second-degree murder.

New York police say the suspect first arrived in the city on Nov. 24 during the Thanksgiving holiday rush. He visited the Hilton Hotel, where the shootings were later to take place, and his encounter with a clerk at the hostel where he was staying was caught on camera.

Ten days later, on December 4, at about quarter to seven in the morning, Thompson was shot dead while on his way to a meeting.

The suspect fled on foot, by bike and by taxi to a bus station near the George Washington Bridge. From there he went out of the city.

Early in the investigation the murder was identified as a targeted attack. The video shows the suspect ignore several pedestrians on a busy Manhattan sidewalk and focus on Thompson.

The shell casings at the scene had words written on them, believed to be a reference to the insurance industry: “delay”, “denial”, “removal”.

Mr. Mangione comes from a large and wealthy family in Baltimore, Maryland, with business interests in nursing homes, real estate, a country club, and a radio station. According to local news outlet the Baltimore Banner,

He attended the all-male private Gilman School, where he graduated as valedictorian at the top of his class.

A former classmate, Freddy Leatherbury, told the Associated Press news agency that Mr. Mangione was from a wealthy family, even by the standards of that private school. “To be honest, he had everything,” Mr Leatherbury said.

Mr. Mangione went to the University of Pennsylvania. According to the school, there he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and founded a video game development club.

A friend, who attended the same Ivy League school as Mr. Mangione, described him as “super normal” and a “smart guy.”

He worked as a data engineer and video game developer and was most recently living in Hawaii.

Social media posts reveal that friends and family members have recently been attempting to contact him and asking about his whereabouts.

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Monday’s arrest ends a dramatic six days in which the alleged killer disappeared, leaving behind few clues and eluding police.

Not only was he able to leave one of the world’s busiest cities using public transportation, his name was not publicly known before Monday. It is also unclear where he hid after leaving New York.

Juliet Kayem, a former assistant secretary for policy at the US Department of Homeland Security, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that her background in technology may have helped her avoid capture for about a week.

“This was someone who was studying how law enforcement and how these cities try to protect themselves, which is essentially having a lot of cameras around them,” he said.

“Now that we know a little bit about him – that he’s a smart guy, he went to great schools, he had advanced degrees, he studied engineering technology, he was into electronic devices – some of it makes sense. It is coming,” said Qayyam.

The suspect also wore a face mask almost constantly, and Mr. Mangione was found to have a fake driver’s license and an untraceable “ghost gun” – a firearm assembled by the owner without a serial number, which the police Said it could be 3D-printed.

Authorities said he used the cash for shopping in New York City and fled the crime scene to Central Park, where there are some surveillance cameras.

But it appeared he also made some basic mistakes – including revealing his face in the dorm, holding a gun and a fake ID card.

Mr. Mangione’s family released a statement Monday night through Mangione’s cousin, a Maryland state legislator.

“Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” Nino Mangione said. “We pray for Brian Thompson’s family and we ask people to pray for everyone involved.”

Mr. Mangione’s online footprint shows few messages about the health care or insurance industry. Instead there are comments about artificial intelligence and technology, science and pop philosophy, and reviews of several books, including 1984 and the Harry Potter series.

But several social media accounts matching his name and photograph offer some possible clues about his motivation.

RJ Martin, Mr. Mangione’s former roommate at a co-living and co-working community in Hawaii, told CNN that the suspect had suffered a back injury.

“He sent me X-rays,” Martin said. “It looked heinous, there were just huge screws driven into his spine.”

The banner image on his X account shows an X-ray of the spine with hardware.

And his account on the user-generated book review website Goodreads indicates that he has read several books about managing back pain, one of them called Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry.

Also on the Goodreads site, Mr. Mangione gave four stars to a text called Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski – better known as the Unabomber Manifesto.

Starting in 1978, Kaczyński carried out a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens of others.

In his review, Mr. Mangione acknowledged that Kaczynski was a violent man who murdered innocent people. However, he also argued that the essay should not be dismissed as the manifesto of a madman, but rather as the work of an “extreme political revolutionary”.

He quoted another online commentator who said: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary for survival”.

Mr. Mangione wrote that he found the take “interesting.”

Police said the three-page handwritten document Mr. Mangione had with him when he was arrested suggested a motive. “Malice” towards corporate America is expressed in these pages.

A senior law enforcement official told The New York Times that the document stated: “These parasites were the reason this was happening” and “I apologize for any aggravation and trauma, but it had to be done”.

Meanwhile reactions to the shooting and Mr. Mangione’s arrest continue to be mixed – sympathy versus sympathy for Thompson and his family. Anger at the state of America’s expensive, overly complex health care system,

In some online venues, the shooting drew criticism from the health insurance industry, and Mr. Mangione was even hailed as a hero.

Police in Altoona said the department received hundreds of emails and calls, including death threats. Some members of the public called the police in support of Mr Mangione, claiming that he was indeed the murderer and that the police “had the wrong man”.

And police are advising McDonald’s employees not to give interviews or statements out of concern for their safety.

The restaurant received hundreds of negative reviews online, with staff being called “rats” and being criticized for calling the police.

Similar sentiments have been expressed online, often in posts by anonymous accounts. But others have condemned such sentiments.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told reporters, “In America, we don’t brutally execute people to settle policy differences or to express our point of view.”

“I understand that people have real frustration with our health care system… but I cannot, and no one should, tolerate a man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone. Because he feels that his opinion matters most.

Shapiro said, “In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me out on this: He’s no hero.”

With reporting by Cai Pigliucci, Jessica Parker and Madeline Halpert