A McDonald’s customer says he is in disbelief that his sighting of 26-year-old murder suspect Luigi Mangione helped officials arrest him less than week after the fatal New York shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Larry, who declined to provide his last name to media outlets including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Fox News, said he spotted the Ivy League engineering graduate outside the restaurant location in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
“It’s unbelievable,” Larry told the Post-Gazette. “I just can’t believe it.”
He said he initially thought his friend was joking while saying, “Don’t that look like the shooter from New York?”
The customer said he spotted Mangione ordering food and sitting toward the back of the restaurant. The customer never interacted with Mangione and instead just informed staff, who alerted the authorities.
‘We were kidding about it’
Police later searched the engineering student, finding both a “semi-automatic pistol” with a silencer and a fake New Jersey driver’s license created with a 3D printer, according to the warrant.
Authories also found “written admissions about the crime” that expressed “ill will toward corporate America,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a news conference Monday.
After leaving the location to go to church, Larry said he returned after learning about Mangione’s arrest.
“The group of us thought it was more of a joke and we were kidding about it,” he told Fox. “But then as it turned out, it was him.”
Mangione charged with second-degree murder
Mangione faces charges of second-degree murder, two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the second-degree, criminal possession of a forged instrument and criminal possession of a weapon in the third-degree, according to New York City arrest warrant filed Tuesday.
The 26-year-old’s arrest comes after both the New York Police Department and the FBI sought the identity of the masked gunman who shot and killed Thompson outside a Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan. Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two and executive of one of the largest U.S. health insurance companies, was going to attend an investor’s conference at that location.
During the search for the masked gunmen, NYPD offered a $10,000 reward and the FBI offered an additional $50,000 for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of a suspect.
At a Tuesday hearing at the Blair County Courthouse in Pennsylvania, Mangione’s attorney Thomas Dickey said his client plans to fight extradition after being denied bail. He’s expected to be extradited to New York City but it remains unclear when that would occur.
Contributing: Christopher Cann, Jorge L. Ortiz and Mary Walrath-Holdridge, USA TODAY