FBI passed tip on Mangione to NYPD after CEO killing

Investigators received a tip from the San Francisco Police Department identifying Luigi Mangione as a suspect before he was arrested in the killing of an insurance executive in midtown Manhattan, the New York FBI field office said Friday.

The tip, which the bureau passed to New York police, was one of many that law enforcement officials received in the days after the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, was fatally shot Dec. 4.

Mangione’s family had reported him missing in San Francisco weeks before the killing. The timing of when the bureau gave that information to New York police remains unclear, as well as whether it might have helped speed his arrest.

Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives for New York police, has said that Mangione was not on the department’s radar before he was captured Monday in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a McDonald’s customer recognized him from pictures distributed by authorities.

Mangione has retained Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a defense lawyer and a former top official in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and will waive extradition and be in New York soon, a person with knowledge of the decision said late Friday night.

Prosecutors have charged Mangione with second-degree murder.

On Friday, scraps of new information and theories emerged about the killing, which struck a resonant chord in a nation where health insurance and access to care have been political flashpoints for decades.

New York police said they had new ideas about how the gunman had escaped after he fled through Central Park on a bicycle. After the attack outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel on West 54th Street, he most likely abandoned the bicycle on the Upper West Side, where police believe someone saw it and stole it, said Carlos Nieves, the department’s assistant commissioner of public information.

Initially, investigators theorized that the man who shot Thompson had left New York on a bus from a terminal in Washington Heights. Cameras captured the man entering the bus depot on West 178th Street at about 7:30 a.m., but not leaving.

After fleeing midtown on the bike in the early morning, the gunman hailed a cab at 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue and traveled to the bus station, paying the fare in cash.

But surveillance camera footage reviewed more recently by investigators showed him leaving the bus depot by subway. The gunman walked from the bus terminal to the 190th Street station, and from there he took the A train downtown to Pennsylvania Station, police said. A camera in a subway elevator captured his movements, Kenny said.

Though many trains leave the station and head west each day, police are still trying to figure out exactly how the suspect got to Pennsylvania, where he was captured after nearly a week, Nieves said.

The footage of the suspect, whom police have identified as Mangione, 26, gave investigators more information as they tried to retrace his movements from New York to the McDonald’s in Altoona where he was found Monday.

Mangione was 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 of the gunman. An employee at the restaurant overheard the customer and called 911 to alert police, who found Mangione with a handgun, ammunition and fake identification cards.

Authorities also found a 262-word handwritten manifesto with him, in which he appears to take responsibility for the killing.

Although Mangione is now expected to be brought to New York soon, his lawyer in Pennsylvania, Thomas M. Dickey, had previously asked the judge to stop extradition and to set bail for his client.

For now, his next scheduled court date is Dec. 23, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, where he faces charges including carrying a gun without a license and forgery.

Mangione’s family has not spoken with New York police, Nieves said.

As for the bicycle, police are still hoping to find it, he said.

“Bikes don’t last very long on the streets around here,” Nieves said. “Someone sees it. They take it, and that’s it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.