A Pennsylvania police officer testified Wednesday about confronting Luigi Mangione during an intense manhunt last year for UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson's killer.
As soon as Mangione doffed his medical mask at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Officer Joseph Detwiler said, "I knew" he was the suspect whose face had been all over the news since the shooting five days earlier on a Manhattan sidewalk.
"It's him … I'm not kidding. He's real nervous, and he didn't talk too much," Detwiler told a supervisor by phone from the restaurant parking lot moments after meeting Mangione, according to the officer's body-camera video. It was played in court on the second day of a hearing about evidence in the case.
Mangione indeed said little initially to Detwiler and another officer, giving only what turned out to be a false name, home state and driver's licence. But Detwiler testified that he'd noticed the man's fingers shaking as they interacted and officers patted him down.
Over the ensuing minutes, Mangione placidly ate a hash brown as the officers waited for colleagues and claimed they were simply responding to loitering concerns at the eatery.
"I was trying to keep him calm," Detwiler told the court, adding that he at one point started whistling over the restaurant's holiday-season music to "make him think that nothing was different about this call than any other call".
Lawyers for Mangione, 27, want to block prosecutors from showing or telling jurors at his eventual Manhattan trial about statements he allegedly made and items authorities said they seized from his backpack during his arrest. The objects include a 9mm handgun that prosecutors say matches the one used in the killing and a notebook in which they say Mangione described his intent to "wack" a health insurance executive.
The defence contends the items should be excluded because police didn't get a warrant before searching Mangione's backpack. They also want to suppress some statements Mangione made to law enforcement personnel, such as allegedly giving a false name, because officers started asking questions before telling him he had a right to remain silent.
The laws concerning how police interact with potential suspects before reading their rights or obtaining search warrants are complex and often disputed in criminal cases.
In Mangione's case, crucial questions will include whether he believed he was free to leave at the point when he spoke to the arresting officers, and whether there were "exigent circumstances" that merited searching his backpack before getting a warrant.
Detwiler testified that he never told Mangione he couldn't leave, nor mentioned the New York shooting. Defence lawyers, however, have argued in court filings that officers "strategically" stood in a way that prevented him from leaving.
Mangione, the Ivy League-educated scion of a wealthy Maryland family, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal murder charges. The state charges carry the possibility of life in prison, while federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Neither trial has been scheduled.
Mangione's lawyers want to bar evidence from both cases, but this week's hearing pertains only to the state case.
Manhattan prosecutors haven't yet laid out their arguments for allowing the disputed evidence. Their federal counterparts have said in court filings that police were justified in searching the backpack to ensure there were no dangerous items and that Mangione's statements to officers were voluntary and made before he was under arrest.
Five witnesses testified on Tuesday, including a Pennsylvania prison officer who said Mangione told him that, when arrested, he had a backpack with foreign currency and a 3D-printed pistol.
Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind as the executive walked to a midtown Manhattan hotel for his company's annual investor conference on December 4, 2024. Prosecutors say "delay," "deny" and "depose" were written on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase insurance industry critics use to describe how companies avoid paying claims.
Thompson, 50, worked at the giant UnitedHealth Group for 20 years and became chief executive of its insurance arm in 2021. He was married and had children who were in high school.
Mangione was arrested as he ate breakfast at a McDonald's in Altoona, bout 370km west of Manhattan. The restaurant's manager had told a 911 dispatcher, "I have a customer here that some other customers were suspicious of — that he looks like the chief executive shooter from New York."
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