Luigi Mangione’s mother made a solemn visit to church less than 24 hours before her son was arrested for being the alleged assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
The accused killer of top brass Brian Thompson, who was shot dead in the streets of New York City, captivated the country after he was captured by authorities following a five-day run from police.
And in the blink of an eye, Kathy Mangione went from a desperate mother searching for her estranged 26-year-old son to the mother of an accused murderer.
‘Less than 24 hours later, their lives completely did a flip flop,’ Santo Grasso, a longtime family friend who was at the church event, told the WSJ.
Those close to the successful family said that a distraught Kathy was doing everything she could for the better half of the year to search for her son after he ‘went off the grid six months to a year ago and wasn’t communicating with anybody,’ the WSJ reported.
His absence affected the family so much that they took it upon themselves to hire a private investigator to locate him.
In the days leading up to her son’s arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Kathy went out to lunch with some friends at an Italian Market near Baltimore’s waterfront on Saturday.
The next afternoon, she and her husband were in attendance at a ceremony honoring one of her brothers located at a church in the city’s Little Italy.
Yet when her son finally resurfaced on Monday, it was in the most shocking of circumstances – his name was plastered everywhere in the media for gunning down the healthcare CEO.
The family has since released a statement expressing their devastation and shock, which said: ‘We only know what we have read in the media’.
Luigi’s arrest after he was spotted by a customer at a McDonald’s rocked the lives of his massive Baltimore-based family – 16 aunts and uncles and more than 30 cousins in total.
Grasso, a 73-year-old retired police detective, remains confident that Luigi’s parents were blindsided by their son’s arrest, considering how calm they looked at the church service Sunday afternoon.
‘It seemed to me that they were just in normal life mode,’ Grasso said. ‘I know them well enough that if something was bugging them or eating them, I would have known.’
Although it’s unclear whether or not the family recognized the pictures posted of their son as he was running from authorities, Grasso suggested that they probably did.
‘I’d probably look at that picture and say “it might not be him, it couldn’t be him,”‘ Grasso told the outlet while thinking how he’d react in the same situation.
Joe Di Pasquale, a friend of all four of Luigi’s grandparents, was floored by the news – recalling how he’d just seen him a year or two ago at his Di Pasquale’s Italian Market as a smiley, well-mannered high achiever.
Pasquale noted how he and his wife were so impressed by his character that they urged their own children to be more like him.
‘We always modeled our kids on how they do,’ he said to the outlet. ‘I drove my kids crazy.’
Throughout the course of the past year, Luigi’s family had no idea where their son was or what he was doing and desperately emailed his friends as a plea for help.
Kathy even reported Luigi missing to the San Francisco Police Department just last month.
‘She would have done everything to find her son and couldn’t,’ a person close to the Mangiones told the outlet.
But the prominent family, their relationship with their son and their mindset during his manhunt has led to nationwide attention.
There were multiple indications that Luigi had been distancing himself from his family at least a year before ultimately cutting ties – based off his Reddit posts and Goodreads book-review site that are thought to have been written by him.
Luigi suffered from a back injury so severe that he became plagued by debilitating pain for months – including after his surgery in July of 2023 – which many think correlated with his mental state.
His spinal injury stopped him surfing, or ‘being physically intimate’ with partners when he lived in Hawaii, his former landlord told the New York Times.
After Luigi started to become MIA, a friend said they had been told that he had struggled with pain medication due to the injury.
Other friends have told media they believed Luigi injured himself in a surfing accident in Hawaii, where he lived off-and-on from around 2022 until this year.
Though schoolmates would talk to each other about Luigi’s alleged estrangement, Luigi’s rich and influential Maryland family were discreet about their troubled son.
‘They’re a big Baltimore family. They like to keep things quiet,’ the schoolfriend said.
He painted a picture of a brilliant and caring classmate, who designed an app for his fellow students and helped others around him – but who changed later in life.
‘He was extremely smart, kind and helpful. He was just truly a good person. And he was an innocent kid, he was like my younger brother, almost.
‘So this whole thing is just extremely shocking,’ the schoolfriend said.
‘About two years ago, I ran into him in Baltimore,’ he added. ‘Something was off.’
The friend said Mangione told him he had temporarily stepped away from his work projects and was ‘taking a break’.
‘He said he was taking a break from some things. His voice was much deeper and a lot more serious and toned down,’ the friend said.
‘I just attributed it to maturity and getting older. Something had changed, but I couldn’t put a finger on what exactly it was.’
‘A few months later I heard he was estranged, had cut everybody off, and they had to hire a private investigator to try to hunt him down, but they couldn’t find him.’
Power Yoga’s Dorian Wright also detailed his run-ins with the 26-year-old Wednesday, remembering how he struggled with certain poses during his classes in Hawaii because of his back pain.
‘I remember with him, like a lot of people that come in with injuries, they tell me right in the beginning of class or while we’re doing certain poses, they’ll say “Oh I can’t do this,”‘ Wright recalled, offering the new insight to CBS News.
On Thursday, his former yoga teacher posted a story to Instagram expressing simultaneous regret and sympathy regarding Luigi’s situation, as he now faces extradition to New York.
‘You never know what kind of pain someone is going through,’ he wrote over a photo of one of Luigi’s mug shots following his arrest.
‘Reach out to a friend today and let them know you care,’ he concluded, as the the case continues to capture headlines.
