Luigi Mangione, 26, the man who was taken into custody Monday morning in Altoona, Pa., and identified as a suspect in the killing of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in Midtown Manhattan last Wednesday, appears to have been a well-educated and well-traveled enthusiast of computer programming and gaming with an interest in self-improvement.
Mr. Mangione grew up in Maryland, according to Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives with the New York City Police Department.
He attended high school at the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he was an athlete and displayed a keen interest in developing video games. According to an interview that was published on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus events blog, Penn Today, in 2018 and that has now been deleted, Mr. Mangione taught himself to code in high school. He and a group of friends then started a game development company, Approar Games, according to posts on his LinkedIn profile and social media accounts.
He was the valedictorian of his graduating class in 2016. In a graduation speech, he described his class as “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it.”
He thanked parents in attendance for sending him and his classmates to the school, which he described as “far from a small financial investment.” Tuition at Gilman is currently $37,690 per year for high schoolers.
Mr. Mangione then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-founded a game development club. He was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and Eta Kappa Nu, an academic honor society for students in electrical and computer engineering, and graduated with both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in engineering.
