By HURUBIE MEKO
Luigi Mangione earlier this week was accused of first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, a charge that branded him a terrorist.
“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said at a news conference Tuesday.
The assassination of the CEO, Brian Thompson, on Dec. 4 in the heart of Manhattan set off a dayslong search and mesmerized Americans, many of whom vented their frustrations on dealings with health insurance companies. Some voiced their support for the gunman and rooted for him to elude capture.
But on Tuesday, prosecutors said that Mangione’s actions were meant to further terrorism and therefore merited a charge of first-degree murder. They were, prosecutors said, “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” and to “affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder.”
While some states define first-degree murder as a premeditated killing, New York requires an additional aggravating circumstance, one of which is terrorism. Others include torture and killing a witness or law officer.
Prosecutors also charged Mangione, 26, with second-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism and another count of second-degree murder. He also faces weapons charges.
A lawyer for Mangione, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, declined to comment on the new charges Tuesday.
Bragg said that they came in response to the “brazen, targeted and premeditated shooting,” adding that he couldn’t think of another office “more equipped to handle a terrorism charge.”
If convicted on the highest charges, Mangione faces a sentence of life in prison without parole.
Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a customer recognized him as the suspect in the shooting and an employee called local police.
On Thursday morning, Mangione is scheduled to return to a courthouse in Pennsylvania for two hearings, including one on gun and forgery charges he faces in that state and another on efforts to extradite him to New York. Bragg said Tuesday that his office had “indications” that Mangione would waive his extradition hearing, allowing the transfer to occur faster.
Last week, prosecutors said Mangione would face a second-degree murder charge. Anna Cominsky, director of the criminal defense clinic at New York Law School, said the terrorism charges were interesting because “this isn’t traditionally how we think of terrorism.”
“What they’re saying is because it was done in the location that it was done in, because of the manner in which it was done, that the aim was to terrorize, that it was to scare people,” she said. “Not just to kill this individual.”
Prosecutors most likely sought the additional charges because “they want to charge all the things that the facts support,” Cominsky said.
The killing at the center of Mangione’s charges unfolded early in the morning of Dec. 4.
Police said Mangione arrived outside a Hilton hotel on West 54th Street — masked and hooded — and waited. After nearly an hour, according to prosecutors, Thompson arrived to prepare for a UnitedHealthcare investors’ day gathering. As Thompson walked to the hotel’s entrance, prosecutors say, Mangione came up behind him, raised a 3-D-printed 9 mm handgun fitted with a suppressor and shot him.
Police launched a citywide search for the shooter, who fled on what they have said was an electric bicycle. Investigators released surveillance pictures of the suspect, including one of him smiling, taken at the front desk of the hostel on the Upper West Side where police said he had stayed.
Police also traced the movements of the shooter from the scene of the killing, to a bus terminal and the 190th Street Station in Washington Heights, where police said he took the A train downtown to Pennsylvania Station.
Mangione was arrested at an Altoona McDonald’s while eating hash browns and looking at his laptop when a fellow customer remarked to a friend that he resembled the person in photos police had released. An employee who overheard called police.
Mangione was found with a handgun, ammunition, fake identification cards and what police have said was a 262-word handwritten manifesto. Authorities have said that he appeared to take responsibility for the killing in the document.
After the killing, many people vented their frustrations — and outright fury — at the health insurance industry.
“We have seen a shocking and appalling celebration of cold-blooded murder,” Jessica Tisch, New York’s police commissioner, said Tuesday. “Social media has erupted with praise for this cowardly attack. ”
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