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Luigi Mangione was indicted on 11 counts, including first-degree murder and murder as a crime of terrorism, in the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Manhattan District Attorney said Thompson’s death “was a killing that was intended to evoke terror”.
The man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO has been charged with murder as an act of terrorism, prosecutors said Tuesday as they worked to bring him to a New York court from a Pennsylvania jail.
Luigi Mangione already was charged with murder in the December 4 killing of Brian Thompson, but the terror allegation is new.
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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Thompson’s death on a midtown Manhattan street “was a killing that was intended to evoke terror. And we’ve seen that reaction.”
“This was a frightening, well-planned, targeted murder that was intended to cause shock and attention and intimidation,” he said at a news conference Tuesday. “It occurred in one of the most bustling parts of our city, threatened the safety of local residents and tourists alike, commuters and businesspeople just starting out on their day.”
Mangione’s New York lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, declined to comment.
Thompson, 50, was shot while walking to a hotel where Minnesota-based UnitedHealthcare — the United States’ biggest medical insurer — was holding an investor conference.
The killing kindled a fiery outpouring of resentment toward US health insurance companies, as Americans swapped stories online and elsewhere of being denied coverage, left in limbo as doctors and insurers disagreed, and stuck with sizeable bills.
The shooting also rattled C-suites, as “wanted” posters with other healthcare executives’ names and faces appeared on New York streets. An outpouring of online vitriol prompted police to warn that there could be an “elevated threat.”
A New York law passed after the September 11 attacks allows prosecutors to charge crimes as acts of terrorism when they’re “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping.”
Prosecutors have used the statute in a variety of contexts.
Its first use was against a Bronx gang member charged in a hail of gunfire that killed a 10-year-old girl and paralyzed a man outside a christening party in 2002. Prosecutors said that shooting was part of a campaign of gang intimidation in a neighborhood.
The state’s highest court later said the conduct didn’t amount to terrorism, threw out the conviction and ordered a new trial. The defendant, who denied involvement in the shooting, was retried, convicted of attempted murder and manslaughter and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
