Lower Back Pain, An Ivy League Degree, And A Very Good Body Are No Excuse To Go Around Murdering Healthcare CEOs

Luigi Mangione. Shutterstock Images.

I don't know about the rest of the nation, but we here in New York City have been following this healthcare CEO murder case with bated breath. And as of yesterday, it appears that the authorities have found their man:

Immediately, jokes and memes poured forth across the internet: 

But once you clear through the humor of an attractive guy with extremely prominent eyebrows and a cartoonishly Italian name, a darker story emerges. Here are some of the details we've learned about young Luigi and his fall from grace: 

NY Times-  He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.

He was also valedictorian of his elite private school, Gilman, where he played soccer, ran cross country, and had a lot of friends. 

“Those are both such disciplined sports. It says a lot about who he was as a student,” Mr. Leatherbury said. “He was very smart, a pretty big math guy, really well read and quite well liked to be honest. I don’t have any bad memories of him. He had a very healthy social circle.”

Calling cross country a sport is generous, sure. As Kenny Powers said, I'm not trying to be the best at exercising. Even so, this guy is not even close to your prototypical disillusioned loner who was bullied, found solace in violent video games, listened to screamo music, and wore trench coats and black eyeliner under constantly wet hair. In every photo of this guy, he seems happy, chiseled, and heading for a promising future. 

Which brings us to our collective effort to find some motive for his decision to murder the United Healthcare CEO in broad daylight in Manhattan. It's 2024, and we've all seen enough true crime docs at this point to know that the police have figured out how to catch people who do this kind of shit now. Luigi definitely knew he was probably toast, as he wrote a manifesto and kept it in his pocket that has him fessing up to the deed. So far, the best we seem to have come up with is that he suffered from serious back pain:

But Mr. Mangione was suffering from painful back issues, he said. “His spine was kind of misaligned,” he said. “He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.”

Still, Mr. Martin said, he and others in the community came to understand that the pain was no small matter to a young man yearning for a normal lifestyle. “He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,” Mr. Martin said. “I remember him telling me that, and my heart just breaks.”

This is extremely weird to me. I've had a lot of lower back pain in my life. In 7th grade I was known for having an extremely long throw-in from the soccer sidelines that was basically as good as a corner kick. I'd take almost all of the throw-ins from our offensive third of the field on my premier soccer team, which saw us winning states and qualifying for the Snickers Cup in Buffalo. But the repeated stresses of bending and uncoiling my spine from those monstrous throw-ins resulted in stress fracture of my L5S1 vertebra, and I was placed in a back brace for the entirety of my 7th-grade year. I had to use a ruler to scratch my back and, with puberty in full swing, the frustrations of being the back brace kid when everyone around you is cupping boobs in closets had me ready to run through a goddamn wall. 

That was a long time ago. But I can still distinctly remember that not once, not ever, did I grow so frustrated from my back pain as to consider murdering a healthcare CEO. 

My Ivy League education did not foment thoughts of upending the corrupt healthcare industry with veiled messages written on bullet casings. I've been to Hawaii—recently, in fact—and I did not return from its balmy shores with thoughts of murder. The point is, we're going to have to dig a little deeper to "justify" why this young man murdered Brian Thompson. Because everything I'm hearing simply doesn't cut it. 

What a weird and wild story. Somehow this dude has become a folk hero because everyone in America fucking hates insurance companies. Yet he's also the portrait of privilege, and someone that I would think most people would despise. On a political note, I would think this kid would have more people pretzeled on how to feel about the story.