.png)
5 hours ago
2
The man charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in December plans to accept more than $300,000 that people who are sympathetic to the accused killer have raised for his legal defense.
More than 10,000 people had contributed an average of about $30 to Luigi Mangione’s defense fund when his legal team indicated it would accept the donations, according to a post on Monday on the GiveSendGo platform that is hosting a fundraising campaign in his benefit.
Mangione “very much appreciates the outpouring of support”, said a statement on GiveSendGo that was attributed to his attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo.
Authorities allege that Mangione, 26, shot Brian Thompson, 50, to death in plain view of a surveillance camera as the UnitedHealthcare chief walked to an investor conference in midtown Manhattan on the morning of 4 December.
A five-day manhunt led to Mangione’s arrest in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, where he purportedly carried a gun that matched the one used to kill Thompson. Mangione also carried fake identification and a notebook expressing disdain for the US’s rapacious private health insurance industry as well as its wealthy executives, investigators have alleged.
Federal prosecutors later charged Mangione with interstate stalking and using a firearm to commit murder. Meanwhile, in a case to be pursued in parallel in New York, state prosecutors charged him with murder and terrorism.
The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said Mangione deserved the terrorism accusations because the killing blamed on him was a “frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation”.
Mangione could face the death penalty if convicted in federal court while his state charges carry a maximum of life imprisonment. He has pleaded not guilty.
A group calling itself The December 4th Legal Committee raised the money on GiveSendGo that Mangione’s defense team has said it would accept. The group’s page says it is “not here to celebrate violence” but believes “in the constitutional right of fair legal representation”.
In remarks to ABC News, Friedman Agnifilo said Mangione “plans on utilizing [the money] to fight all … of the unprecedented cases against him”.
A poll published in late December by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago concluded that most Americans believe the health insurance’s profits – aided greatly by routine denials of coverage – shared some responsibility for Thompson’s slaying. But the survey found about 80% of Americans believed Thompson’s killer had either “a great deal” or “a moderate amount” of responsibility for the murder.
Despite that poll, some who have contributed to Mangione’s legal defense fund on GiveSendGo made it clear that – in their eyes – he had done nothing wrong.
“Let’s defend the [right] for self defense,” one contributor wrote on the platform. “Mangione’s actions were an act [where] he [defends] his own right to life.”
Another wrote: “Free the guy, his work here isn’t done (he’s innocent)!”
Mangione was an Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland family. He appeared to have cut himself off from friends and relatives in the months before Thompson’s murder, posting frequently in online forums about his struggles with back pain.
He was never a UnitedHealthcare client, the insurer has said.
Thompson was married and had two children in high school. He had worked at UnitedHealth Group for 20 years and became the leader of its insurance arm in 2021.
