Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old suspect arrested in connection to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was valedictorian of the Gilman School in Baltimore in 2016, a resurfaced video shows. Mangione was detained in Altoona, Pennsylvania on Monday after he was found with an unlicensed gun, a silencer and fake ID cards. According to the New York Police, he is a “strong person of interest” in the killing of Mr Thompson, who was shot in the chest last week when he was attending an investors’ conference.
Now, a 2016 video of Luigi Mangione delivering a valedictorian speech at his school is going viral on social media. In his speech, the 26-year-old shared his aspirations to study artificial intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Take a look at the video below:
REPORT: Luigi Mangione, who was named a person of interest in the execution of CEO Brian Thompson, was valedictorian of the Gilman School in 2016.
I have found footage of his valedictorian speech at the 119th Gilman School Founder’s Day Ceremony.
Mangione is one of six… pic.twitter.com/nPuXtmirWO
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 9, 2024
In his speech, Mangione also lauded his classmates for “coming up with new ideas and challenging the world,” citing successful fundraisers and accomplishments in sports and academics, as per CNN. “To the class of 2016, a kind of class that only comes around once every 50 years, it’s been an incredible journey, and I simply can’t imagine the last few years with any other group of guys,” he said.
Mangione comes from a famous Baltimore family. He is the grandson of Nicholas Mangione, a famed Baltimore real-estate developer and Mary C Mangione, a philanthropist, as per CNN.
He graduated from the prestigious Gilman School, an all-boys institution that is known as one of Baltimore’s toniest private schools. He then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 2020 with a master’s and bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics.
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In an interview for a university blog post, Mangione talked about how he had started a video game development club. “In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” Mangione said. “In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I learned (on my own) how to program, and that’s why I’m a computer science major now; that’s how I got into it… I just really wanted to make games,” he added.
After graduating, the 26-year-old worked as a software engineer for the online car sales company TrueCar, according to his LinkedIn page. His most recent address was in Hawaii, NYPD officials said.
Mangione has been named as a person of interest in the killing of Brian Thompson. He has been charged with murder, along with two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, one count of second-degree possession of a forged document and one count of third-degree criminal possession of a firearm.