Luigi Mangione disappeared months before United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s fatal shooting

Months before United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death on a Manhattan sidewalk, suspect Luigi Mangione went dark and loved ones desperately tried to find him.

They reached out to former classmates and posted pleas on social media for any word on his whereabouts. Rumors about his disappearance began circulating among his former classmates.

After months of silence and growing worry from his family and friends, Mangione finally resurfaced Monday when he was captured by police in Pennsylvania as the suspect in Thompson’s killing. Authorities said he was carrying a backpack containing a ghost gun, fake IDs, and a notebook and other writings detailing his grievances with the health care system.

Until he disappeared, the high-achieving young man from a prominent Baltimore family had led what many would consider a charmed life, finishing as valedictorian at an elite Maryland high school and traveling the world after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.

Friends and family described Mangione, who is being held without bail in a Pennsylvania correctional facility, as a kind and intelligent computer science graduate who enjoyed traveling and reading.

“He was the kind of person that you would know was going to do great things,” said his friend R.J. Martin, owner of Surfbreak, a co-living space in Honolulu, where Mangione lived for six months in 2022.

“It’s just utterly heartbreaking to think that he could have been an assassin, and heartbreaking to know that his life is essentially forever over or altered in unimaginable ways.”

After a dayslong manhunt, Mangione, 26, was charged in New York on Monday with one count of murder, three counts of criminal possession of a weapon and one count of possession of a forged instrument.

He was arrested earlier that day in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he was found eating at a McDonald’s restaurant and carrying a backpack containing what authorities said was evidence connecting him to Thompson’s fatal shooting.

Mangione was also arraigned in Pennsylvania on two felony charges of forgery and carrying a firearm without a license, as well as three misdemeanor charges of tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of crime and providing false identification to law enforcement.

Mangione is fighting extradition to New York, and his lawyer, Thomas Dickey, said he has yet to see evidence linking his client to Thompson’s killing. He also said Mangione would plead not guilty to the charges in Pennsylvania and New York.

A voracious reader and gamer who left behind a robust online footprint, Mangione shed light on his interests and perhaps his mental state in an archived version of his now-deleted Reddit account, where he first appeared in 2016 under the username “Mister_Cactus.”

The account included posts on a subreddit about spondylolisthesis, a condition where a bone in the spine slips out of alignment, putting pressure on lower vertebrae and nerves around the spine.

“Mister_Cactus” wrote on the subreddit in April that his condition “went bad to the point where I felt it every day.”

Reddit posts from last year point to an injury flare-up after the account holder went surfing. The movement aggravated back pain, which “Mister_Cactus” said he had dealt with since childhood, according to a post in July 2023.

Other posts suggest the account holder underwent spinal fusion surgery sometime around that date. “Mister_Cactus” told another user two weeks before the procedure, “I keep wondering why I was so afraid of it.”

The next month, it appeared “Mister_Cactus” experienced positive results from the operation. He wrote that after a week, he “was on literally zero pain meds” and was able to sit, walk and stand.

“When my spondy went bad on me last year (23M) it was completely devastating as a young athletic person,” “Mister_Cactus” wrote in a separate post in August 2023, referring to himself as a 23-year-old male with spondylolisthesis.

These descriptions are consistent with information Mangione shared with Martin, his friend in Hawaii. The two last texted about nine months ago, when Martin reached out to ask Mangione whether he had undergone spinal surgery. Mangione replied with images showing screws in his back, Martin said.

“You wouldn’t know he’s in pain until afterwards he might say, ‘Oh, sorry. I couldn’t get out of bed for a couple days.’ And that’s kind of the beginning and end of it,” Martin said.

In early April, “Mister_Cactus” posted a packing list and suggestions he said worked well during two months he spent traveling in Asia. The post was made on a Reddit group devoted to minimalist travel and packing only one bag.

“Mister_Cactus” also posted comments in May, offering advice in the spondylolisthesis Reddit group about his spinal condition.

The account’s final post appeared to have been made on May 25, when he shared in the “tedkaczysnki” subreddit a video called “Streaming overdose 2024 , China” showing a series of video clips of numerous people in various spaces streaming on their cellphones.

On an account that appears to be Mangione’s on the book review site Goodreads, he reviewed Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future,” also known as “The Unabomber Manifesto,” in January.

“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” the poster wrote.

Mangione had mentioned Kaczynski to Gurwinder Bhogal, a British freelance writer and Substack author who exchanged some 20 messages with Mangione from April through June, Bhogal said.

Mangione was a “founding member” of his newsletter and expressed a mix of left-wing and right-wing political views. He also vented about the high cost of health care in the U.S., Bhogal said.

“Overall, the impression I got of him, besides his curiosity and kindness, was a deep concern for the future of humanity, and a determination to improve himself and the world,” Bhogal wrote in an email to NBC News.

Bhogal said he and Mangione had “briefly touched on the differences between the UK and US healthcare systems. Luigi complained about how expensive healthcare in the US was, and expressed envy at the UK’s nationalized health system.”

During their exchanges, Bhogal said Mangione discussed spending time in Japan and worried people there “don’t really live their lives — most of the young men are addicted to video games, pornography, and other shallow entertainments.”

“One thing he said was the people around him were on a different wavelength, and he was eager to be a part of a community of like-minded people,” Bhogal added. “He suggested I schedule group video calls as he really wanted to meet my other founding members and start a community based on ideas like rationalism, Stoicism, and effective altruism.”

In September, Mangione’s phone number disappeared from a WhatsApp group for Penn alumni in Hawaii, according to Raj George, president of the Penn Club of Hawaii. He briefly met Mangione in 2023 during a tour of the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu.

Like others, George described Mangione as bright and friendly.

“He was really excited about the club, wanting to see how else he could get involved to connect with other Penn alums,” George said. “Everything was really pleasant — there were no signs to make us think otherwise.”

Freddie Leatherbury, one of Mangione’s former classmates at the Gilman School in Maryland, said he received messages from friends on Oct. 1, asking if he had spoken to Mangione. They were never close and it had been years since the two crossed paths. Leatherbury said he was dismayed to learn Mangione was missing.

“He was an impressive but unassuming kid,” Leatherbury remembered. “I didn’t even know how smart he was until he was named valedictorian. It kind of just speaks to how humble and passive he was. He just went about his thing, did it quietly and did it very well.”

A cousin of Mangione’s reached out to other Gilman alums asking whether they’d had any recent contact with him, according to a former classmate who asked that his name be withheld out of privacy concerns.

The cousin said Mangione had been missing for months, had undergone back surgery and the family was desperate to find him. Members of that friend group tried texting and direct-messaging Mangione, but no one heard back, the former classmate said.

In mid-November, Mangione’s mother filed a missing person report in San Francisco, according to two senior law enforcement officials.

Thompson was shot and killed on Dec. 4 outside a midtown Manhattan hotel, where he was scheduled to speak at a conference. His death prompted a multistate manhunt.

Police in Pennsylvania found a fraudulent New Jersey driver’s license for a 26-year-old Maplewood resident named “Mark Rosario” in Mangione’s backpack, according to an image of the phony ID obtained by NBC New York.

The same name was used by Thompson’s alleged killer to check in to a New York hostel days before the attack, multiple law enforcement sources told NBC News.

Mangione’s arrest has turned him into a symbol of resistance for those frustrated by the U.S. health care system and has sparked a renewed fascination with a Pokemon character associated with him.

But others caution against lionizing Mangione.

“I think the whole thing is an absolute tragedy,” said New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “You have a father, a friend, a family man, who was killed.”