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Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who would play assassin games, according to a report.
Alejandro Romero, a University of Pennsylvania student from the same Discord gaming group as Mangione, said they would play “Among Us,” a game where some players have to secretly kill others without raising suspicions.
“I just found it extremely ironic that, you know, we were in this game and there could actually be a true killer among us,” Romero told NBC News.
“As soon as his photo and name popped up on X, my friend texted me asking if I knew him, and then either I was calling some 10 friends or they were calling me,” he continued. “I didn’t speak to anybody today who wasn’t already aware of what had happened.”
Mangione, a Maryland native, was arraigned on weapons charges Monday evening after being arrested that morning when a McDonald’s worker at an Altoona, Pa., franchise thought they recognized him from wanted posters and called the police.
Romero, who said he had not seen or spoken to Mangione since 2020, remembered him as a typical college student.
“He just fit a mold,” Romero said. “He just seemed like any other normal frat dude that you could see at a frat party.”
After the pandemic cut their senior year short, the Discord group kept the friends connected, but only for some time, according to Romero, who said people started to drift as they got jobs and started their adult lives.
In the years since leaving college, Mangione left behind a bizarre and befuddling mix of political views on social media — with posts expressing viewpoints from seemingly every corner of the political spectrum.
Mangione also expressed his love for a slew of authors, bloggers, thinkers, and revolutionists including Aldous Huxley, Tim Urban, Jonathan Haidt, and Ted Kzacinski, leaving a review of his “Unabomber Manifesto” on Goodreads, a social media site for book reviews.
What we know about the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson
- Brian Thompson, the CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down Wednesday outside a luxury Midtown hotel in a “brazen, targeted attack,” police said.
- Thompson was named CEO of UnitedHealth in April 2021. He joined the company in 2004. He was one of several senior executives at the company under investigation by the Department of Justice.
- Thompson’s wife, Paulette, said her husband had been getting threats before he was killed.
- Thompson’s shooting led to sick support online, and even spurred a tasteless lookalike competition in NYC.
- A person of interest has been nabbed by police officers inside a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa.
- The suspect has been identified as Luigi Mangione, 26, originally from Towson, Md. He’s a former Ivy League student who hated the medical community.
Follow along with The Post’s live updates on the news surrounding Brian Thompson’s murder.
The 26-year-old shared a quote on his Goodreads account from Kaczynski, the infamous “Unabomber’’ who terrorized the country for nearly two decades by mailing deadly bombs before he was nabbed in 1996.
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness,’’ Kaczynski wrote at one point in a quote liked by Mangione.
When asked about Mangione’s perplexing online persona, Romero had similar questions.
“I feel like people are unsure how to label him,” he told the outlet. “I’m personally struggling to understand how this all fits.