A high school classmate of the suspect under arrest for fatally gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week said the news “came out of nowhere,” and described the situation as “just, really surreal.”
“He had a lot of things going for him,” Ellison Jordan, who graduated from the Gilman School alongside 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, told The Independent. “He was always cool people.”
Jordan attended Gilman, a prestigious all-boys prep school in Baltimore, with Mangione, and found him to be “a smart dude,” and “a regular guy,” he said on Tuesday.
“I’m being sensitive to Luigi, because I went to school with him,” Jordan, who has not spoken to the media previously about Mangione, went on. “I hope he didn’t do it. I’m praying he didn’t do it. It’s still ‘allegedly.’ It’s really shocking.”
At the same time, Jordan emphasized that he was keeping Thompson in his thoughts, saying he was fully aware the exec could “never go back to his family.”
Jordan, a top football prospect who went on to play on the defensive line at Penn State, remembered Mangione, who was the valedictorian of their class, as “obviously a very smart person,” albeit a “very quiet” one who “didn’t really say much.”
When he heard his former friend had been accused of murder, Jordan, 27, said it took a little while for it to sink in.
“I heard about the shooting of the CEO, but to find out that the person of interest was him? It was shocking,” Jordan said. “It didn’t seem real… For him to have allegedly done this, it’s just really hard to put into words. I know that’s a cliché, but I really don’t know what happened… It’s just very unfortunate, very crazy overall.”
Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two who lived in Minnesota, was fatally shot on December 4 as he arrived at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan for an investor conference, where he was scheduled to deliver an address on UnitedHealthcare’s financial outlook for the coming year. As he arrived shortly before 7 a.m., a masked man clad in all-black stepped out from between two cars and pumped several rounds into his back and leg using a silenced 9mm semi-automatic handgun. Thompson was rushed to the nearby Mt. Sinai West hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
Investigators recovered several spent and live rounds at the crime scene with the words “deny,” “depose,” and “defend” scrawled on them, which seemed to echo the title of a 2010 book by Rutgers law professor Jay Feinman, who explored the myriad ways insurance companies deny patient claims to increase profits.
A multi-state manhunt was promptly launched, which Mangione, a UPenn graduate, managed to evade for several days. On Monday, he was spotted at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, by an employee who called police. Officers searched Mangione and found a so-called ghost gun with a silencer, a number of fake IDs, including one he used days earlier to check into a Manhattan hostel under an assumed name, and a handwritten manifesto railing against the American healthcare industry, according to authorities.
According to Jordan, Mangione wasn’t outwardly suffering, healthwise, during his high school years.
“He didn’t talk about any medical issues,” he said, adding that Mangione “came from a great family, and you don’t expect something like this to come from a person like him.”
Jordan “wants to pray” for Mangione, but also must be “considerate of the person who lost his life.”
“I knew him, I knew what he stood for. He had no contentious vibe,” Jordan said. “He didn’t have any type of vibes like that, none of us did. It’s just a shock to all of us… There’s not a lot to say beyond that.”
Although a motive has not yet been definitively pinned down, Mangione reportedly had severe back issues that caused him debilitating pain and also hampered his love life.
RJ Martin, who owns a co-living space in Honolulu where Mangione stayed for about six months, said the Maryland native moved to Hawaii to get healthy before a planned back operation in 2023. Martin said Mangione had shown him X-rays of his back, which “looked heinous, with just giant screws going into his spine.”
“His spine was kind of misaligned,” Martin told The New York Times. “He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve. Sometimes he’d be doing well and other times not.”
Following Mangione’s surgery, he fell out of touch with friends and family, according to multiple sources. Aaron Cranston, who went to Gilman with Jordan and Mangione, told the Times that Mangione’s relatives reached out to him and others after the procedure because no one had heard from him for months.
Mangione’s parents, sister, and cousin, Nino Mangione — a Republican state legislator — did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
On Tuesday, Nino canceled a political appearance set to take place at Hayfields, a country club in Baltimore County founded by his grandparents and now run by his uncle, Luigi Mangione’s father.
“Because of the nature of this terrible situation involving my Cousin I do not believe it is appropriate to hold my fundraising event scheduled for this Thursday at Hayfields,” he wrote on Facebook. “I am going to postpone this event until later at a more appropriate time… I want to thank you for your thoughts, prayers, and support. My family and I are heartbroken and ask that you remember the family of Mr. Thompson in your prayers.”
