The Luigi Mangione legal saga

Governor Kathy Hochul and other New York state lawmakers want 3D-printer companies to block the printing of components used to create “ghost guns” — firearms without serial numbers that can be printed privately, easily avoiding a background check.

At a press event on Tuesday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said two 3D-printing companies had voluntarily agreed to adopt technology that would block the creation of guns using their printers; another digital design company agreed to remove some firearm CAD files (the printing blueprints) from their services, Bragg said. Lawmakers have proposed legislation that would make it illegal to sell or possess gun CAD files without a license and would require 3D-printer companies to block the printing of firearms. Related restrictions have been proposed or are law in states like Colorado, New Jersey, and Washington.

On Monday, several dozen members of the public are lined up outside 100 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan, hoping to squeeze into the courtroom to hear testimony from witnesses called by the state against Luigi Mangione — the man accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson a year ago.

Despite the endless news coverage, viral memes, and photos seen by millions of people, the group that shows up to hearings has thinned out significantly since the court date in February, when hundreds gathered outside and in the courthouse. There is a small demonstration ramping up, organized by healthcare reform group People Over Profit NYC. I recognize many of the people in line trying to get inside from previous hearings I’ve attended. It’s not the same rowdy, chaotic scene from February; like other grassroots movements, it has professionalized. Supporters hire line-sitters, come with custom T-shirts, and have developed a suspicion of reporters looking for soundbites. When they do speak to the press, many are careful about staying on-message: the focus is on a fair trial, they say, and their presence as supporters is an act of protest.

The first people in line on Tuesday, I was told, started camping out on the sidewalk two days ago. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, was due in court at 9AM ET for a hearing in one of three concurrent criminal cases against him. And this time everyone was prepared for the mayhem: the signs, the fans, the livestreamers, the protests, the media circus. That’s why the line started even earlier than last time — the people who really wanted to get in to see him knew that no time was too early.

Mangione is both ubiquitous and fleeting. The last time the public saw him (aside from a bizarre, unauthorized appearance in a men’s shirt listing on Shein) was in February at this same courthouse in Manhattan, when hundreds of members of the general public and media convened for a routine pretrial hearing. He exists in memes, in passing references, and in content moderation decisions, and he lives rent-free in the mind of Donald Trump — yet most people are likely not thinking or talking about Mangione day to day. They are reminded of him when new photos drop or when there are incremental updates in the cases against him. But the wall-to-wall coverage of the case has waned, and it’s the people who are the most tapped in that are working to keep interest in the case alive. Mangione and the larger discussions around healthcare reform are one item in a list of approximately 8,000 pressing topics swirling in the US. How do you keep attention and energy alive in an information ecosystem defined by its fragmentation?

There are so many people here that nobody can tell where the end of the line is. New people arrive, ask if there’s a line, shuffle into a blob of bodies idling and waiting for someone to give them instructions. The hallway is horribly warm — unclear if it’s from the bodies or the heat — and it’s a little smelly, which could just be me but I don’t think it is. I estimate between 100 and 150 people are hanging around, waiting for 2:15PM to roll around, their anticipation building. This is not a club with a strict bouncer, though it feels like it. This is the Luigi Mangione hearing.

The hearing is a relatively minor pre-trial status update, but for the people most tapped in, there is a lot riding on it — the Luigi info-drip has been a bit dry lately. Court dates for the 26 year old accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December keep getting pushed back. Mangione, who is currently being held in federal custody in a Brooklyn jail, has not made a public appearance since before Christmas. (Mangione is accused of gunning down Thompson in December outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel, and has pleaded not guilty.) On TikTok, commenters regularly complain that they haven’t seen Luigi on their For You page in months. When Mangione’s legal team launched a new website with updates on the case, a flood of donations came pouring into his legal fund — more than half a million dollars as of this writing.

When the first grainy images of the UnitedHealthcare shooting suspect emerged, some viewers noticed a seemingly small detail: he looked like he was wearing a Peak Design Everyday V1 backpack. Now, on platforms like Threads and TikTok, a recurring accusation has circulated: Peak Design “traced” the bag owner using the backpack’s serial number.

However, the company says that’s just not true, in a statement shared with The Verge Friday afternoon. “Peak Design has not provided customer information to the police and would only do so under the order of a subpoena,” the statement signed by CEO Peter Dering reads.

We’ve already seen our fair share of bad Apple Intelligence-summarized notifications, but now that the feature is live in the UK, the BBC isn’t finding it so funny. The summarized notification mucked up a BBC headline about the UnitedHealthcare shooting suspect, falsely suggesting the network reported that Luigi Mangione shot himself.

In a report about the notification, a spokesperson for the network says it contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem.”

Luigi Mangione has been inescapable, hasn’t he? His face is all over my social media feeds. Outlet after outlet — some mainstream, some otherwise — have published stories about the video games he liked, his Reddit comments, his Goodreads page, his political ideology, his back pain. Mangione is not merely an accused murderer; he is a celebrity.

There was a time, fairly recently, when it was felt that the best practice in a high-profile shooting was to avoid publicizing the accused killer’s identity and detailing the method by which it was accomplished. The idea, as articulated by Zeynep Tufekci in 2012, was that highly publicized killings functioned as a kind of social contagion; murder as a kind of advertisement for the shooter’s manifesto. Social media platforms generally scrubbed the profiles of people accused of high-profile killings; as recently as 2020, Facebook suppressed searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse,” after he was charged with murder.

Moderators of multiple Reddit communities say the company has banned posts that include the alleged manifesto of Luigi Mangione, who has been charged for murder in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

In a post on Wednesday, a moderator of r/popculturechat wrote (emphasis theirs):

Police have arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old software developer, in connection with the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione, of Maryland, was detained at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania on Monday morning.

Mangione was taken into custody on local firearm charges, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters. He has not been charged in connection with the shooting but is “believed to be our person of interest,” Tisch said.

CNN is reporting that according to an unnamed source in law enforcement, the person who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan fled on an e-bike, but not a Citi Bike, as NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenney previously said during a press conference.

Thompson had been scheduled to appear at the company’s investor meeting, which was canceled a few hours later. Kenney said it looked like the killer “specifically targeted” Thompson and that “at this point, we do not know why.” The CEO’s wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News that “there had been some threats.”