From Privileged And Popular To An Accused Killer: The Story Of Luigi Mangione

TOWSON, MD — The graduate of an elite prep school and Ivy League University, Luigi Nicholas Mangione is a Towson native from an affluent business family who seemed to struggle this year after back surgery. He is charged with murder in the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Family and friends say Mangione, 26, lost contact with them in recent months, and his social media accounts reflect a shift from posts on books he read, workout routines and his travels to a person in pain and unhappy with the health-care industry.

Family reported him missing

Mangione was reported missing by his family last month after he ended contact with them following the surgery, according to media reports. Mangione’s mother, Kathleen Mangione, filed a missing person report about her son with the San Francisco Police Department on Nov. 18, The San Francisco Standard reported.

“Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you,” one user posted on X in October, CNN reported. “I don’t know if you are okay,” another wrote.

The New York Times reported about six months ago, Mangione stopped communicating with friends and family while suffering from a painful back injury.

In July, Mangione was tagged on a social media account by someone who wrote they hadn’t heard from him in months. “You made commitments to me for my wedding and if you can’t honor them I need to know so I can plan accordingly,” the man wrote in a now-deleted post, according to the Times.

Friends stunned: 'It's unimaginable'

R.J. Martin, who lived with Mangione at a Hawaii co-living space a few years ago, told CNN the accusations against his friend make “zero sense. It’s unimaginable.”

Alejandro Romero, who attended the University of Pennsylvania with Mangione and was a member of the same Discord group, said the Ivy League gamers played assassins in online games.

"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.

Romero said he has not spoken to or seen Mangione since 2020 but described his former classmate 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."

Thomas J. Maronick Jr., a lawyer and radio host who knows several members of the Mangione family, said Mangione was “just the last person you would suspect” of committing a homicide.

“It is just such a well-respected family and such a prominent family within Baltimore County,” Maronick said.

Catonsville resident Freddie Leatherbury graduated with Mangione in 2016 from Gilman School, an all-boys prep school where Mangione was the valedictorian. Leatherby told NewsNation on Tuesday that those who know Mangione are stunned by the criminal accusations.

Leatherbury said he hadn’t talked to Mangione in recent years, but followed him on social media, and saw no warning signs of potential trouble.

“It doesn’t seem thinkable that this is the same person,” Leatherbury said. “It just goes so against everything I knew about Luigi. None of us can come up with any leads or any history of inclination to do anything.

Classmates say he was social, personable

Classmates from Mangione’s elite private school, Gilman in Baltimore, as well as friends from the University of Pennsylvania, told the Times that Mangione is smart — creating a mobile app to fly a paper airplane through obstacles — as well as social, personable and ambitious in his field of study, computer science.

Liam Fennessy, a graduate of Boys' Latin School of Maryland, told Patch he chaperoned Mangione during a summer 2010 hiking trip in Vermont.

"He seemed like a genuinely nice, normal middle school kid at the time," Fennessy told Patch in a Tuesday message on X.

Speaking on CNN, R.J. Martin, a friend of Mangione’s from Honolulu, said the suspect told him he suffered a back injury and had surgery earlier this year.

Jackie Wexler, a food technologist in New York who attended Penn with Mangione and used to live with him at Surfbreak, described him as a thoughtful man who facilitated discussions by deeply listening.

“It just makes me sad to think how alone he must feel,” Wexler told Honolulu Civil Beat.

Back injury, then 'went radio silent'

Martin said Mangione showed him X-rays that showed a “heinous” image of screws in his spine.
“When you’re in your early twenties and can’t do basic things, it can be really difficult,” Martin said.

Martin, the founder of a co-living space in Hawaii called Surfbreak, told the Honolulu Civil Beat that Mangione lived in the community for six months in 2022. Mangione talked of treatment he needed to relieve chronic pain linked to a pinched nerve.

“He went radio silent in June or July,” Martin said.

A spokesperson for Martin told the Times that Mangione’s back injury kept him from surfing and had affected his romantic life.

Related:

• MD Man Charged With Murder In Health Care CEO's Killing
• Luigi Mangione: What We Know About Person Of Interest In CEO Death