A fundraiser for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in New York last year, has raised over $1 million. The fundraiser surpassed that milestone on Tuesday, Mangione’s 27th birthday, and comes as his legal defense has sought to get much of the evidence obtained by police when Mangione was arrested tossed out.
The $1 million has come from over 28,000 individual contributions, with a median donation of about $20, according to a press release from the fundraisers at GiveSendGo. Other fundraisers started on more mainstream crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe were shut down for violating their terms of service.
Mangione is accused of shooting Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on the morning of Dec. 4, 2024, when the health care executive was walking to a conference in Manhattan. The death of Thompson was captured on security camera footage at the Hilton hotel in Midtown and kicked off a manhunt over the course of the next week before Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
Police say Mangione was arrested with a gun and a so-called “manifesto,” though the alleged manifesto appears to have been just 262 words long. The note was obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein and describes people who, “abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed [sic] them to get away with it.”
The killing kicked off a national conversation about health care in the U.S., which is the most expensive in the world, while delivering some of the worst health outcomes among all wealthy countries. Many Americans empathized and justified the killing of any health care CEO, while others qualified their support by saying that while they don’t condone murder, they understood what would drive someone to do that.
The latest legal filing from Mangione’s defense team in the New York state case is quite a revelation. The accused killer’s lawyers say that cops in Pennsylvania conducted a warrantless search of Mangione’s backpack, admitted screwing that up verbally, which was captured by bodycam, then tried to retroactively justify the search as being necessary because they were worried about potential explosives. The police then put that backpack, which cops say had a gun, into a patrol car for 11 minutes, where no bodycam footage is available.
From the shocking legal filing:
The officers continued their warrantless search through Mr. Mangione’s backpack at McDonald’s even after he was removed from the restaurant by other officers and driven to the precinct. During this continued search at McDonald’s, Patrolwoman Wasser recovered a gun magazine loaded with bullets. Now realizing she had made a potentially devastating mistake by thoroughly searching the backpack of a murder suspect in a significant New York press case without a warrant, she suddenly stated that she was searching through the backpack at McDonald’s to make sure there “wasn’t a bomb or anything in here” before putting the backpack in the car. The falsity of that comment was made clear seconds later when another officer at McDonald’s stated ”Now that we found that [i.e., the loaded magazine], let’s just bring it back” to the precinct. Suddenly not concerned about a “bomb,” Patrolwoman Wasser placed all the items back into the backpack and stopped searching. Patrolwoman Wasser repeated her comment that she was making sure there were no bombs in the backpack, as another officer commented that “at this point we probably need a search warrant for it.” Without calling for the bomb squad, evacuating the McDonald’s or even searching for a bomb, Patrolwoman Wasser placed the backpack in her police car and brought it to the precinct.
Patrolwoman Wasser left McDonald’s at 10:04 a.m. There is no body-worn camera footage from her for the next 11 minutes as she drives to the precinct with the backpack. At 10:16 a.m., one minute after arriving at the precinct, Patrolwoman Wasser continued her warrantless search of the backpack. Patrolwoman Wasser first re-opened the same backpack compartment that she had started searching at the McDonald’s before immediately closing that compartment and opening the front compartment of the backpack as if she was specifically looking for something. Instantly, she “found” a handgun in the front compartment.
Mangione’s lawyers also write that he wasn’t read his Miranda rights, a violation of the Fifth Amendment. And they also want the terrorism charges dismissed because a grand jury, “failed to establish the required element that Mr. Mangione intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion or affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping.”
Mangione faces both state and federal charges. Attorney General Pam Bondi, an appointee of Donald Trump who has purged the U.S. Department of Justice of anyone who doesn’t demonstrate fealty to the president, has instructed prosecutors to seek the death penalty.
“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson—an innocent man and father of two young children—was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America,” Bondi said in a statement last month. “After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”