Luigi Mangione believed killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to be a “symbolic takedown” and “a direct challenge” to the healthcare company’s corruption and “power games,” according to law enforcement sources who have reviewed the alleged murderer’s manifesto.
Mangione, who had the three-page handwritten manifesto on him when he was busted at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s yesterday, was likely driven to violence by his perceptions that the health care industry is “parasitic,” sources said.
The alleged gunman criticized the US for having the “most expensive healthcare system in the world” and was upset watching profits of healthcare companies — which he described as “mafiosa” — continue to rise while Americans’ life expectancy lags behind other industrialized countries, sources said.
He views himself as a “hero” for killing Thompson, claiming in the document that he was taking on the healthcare industry with “brutal honesty,” sources said.
Mangione, 26, may have found inspiration for his violence in “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, the extremist luddite who terrorized the country for nearly two decades by mailing deadly bombs before he was nabbed in 1996.
