BALTIMORE—Before Kathy Mangione became known as the mother of a suspected assassin, she was just a parent looking for her son.
She had desperately searched for 26-year-old Luigi Mangione for the better part of a year, according to people close to the family. One said that he “went off the grid six months to a year ago and wasn’t communicating with anybody,” and that his distraught mother was doing all she could to find him. Another said the Ivy League engineering graduate was “MIA for about eight months.”
When Luigi Mangione finally resurfaced Monday, it was under the grimmest of circumstances—as the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson in New York City and an alleged fugitive whose five-day run from police captivated the country. After a hearing Tuesday, Mangione’s lawyer said his client plans to plead not guilty to all charges: “I haven’t seen any evidence that says that he’s the shooter.”
In the days leading to her son’s arrest in Altoona, Pa., Kathy Mangione seemed to go about life normally. On Saturday, she lunched with friends at an Italian market near Baltimore’s waterfront. The next afternoon, she and her husband, Lou Mangione , attended a ceremony honoring one of her brothers at a church in the city’s Little Italy.
“Less than 24 hours later, their lives completely did a flip-flop,” said Santo Grasso , a longtime family friend who chatted with the couple at the church event. The family has released a statement expressing devastation and shock: “We only know what we have read in the media.”
Luigi Mangione’s arrest has rocked a sprawling family—he grew up with 16 aunts and uncles—tightly moored in the Baltimore area. The Mangiones would tailgate in the lobby of the same hospital every time another baby was born, as Luigi and more than 30 of his cousins had been. On his mother’s side, the Zanninos are known for the brick funeral home they have run for decades in a working-class area that has transitioned from Italian-American to Latino.
The accusation that Mangione gunned down Thompson on a Manhattan street floored Joe Di Pasquale , who knew all four of his grandparents. He recalled the young man he last saw a year or two ago at his Di Pasquale’s Italian Market as a well-mannered high achiever with a big smile. Di Pasquale and his wife were so impressed with him and his sisters in their younger years that they encouraged their own children to be more like them. “We always modeled our kids on how they do,” he said. “I drove my kids crazy.”
The Mangiones have hosted lavish weddings at the family-owned country club north of Baltimore and records show that Kathy and Lou Mangione own a home assessed by the state at $2 million. As of 2022, Lou and all nine of his siblings worked for the golf clubs and nursing-home chain that their parents, Nick and Mary Mangione, built into successful enterprises.
Despite a migration to the suburbs, the Mangiones maintain ties to Little Italy, where patriarch Nick Mangione spent his early years in poverty and the Italian pride extends to fire hydrants painted green, red and white. The family has visited the enclave of row houses near downtown for fairs celebrating saints, church services at St. Leo the Great Roman Catholic Church and summer evenings of competitive bocce, residents say.
“You would not know that they have money. They never flaunt anything,” said Giovanna Blattermann , 77, a Little Italy booster and cafe owner who has lived there since arriving from Sicily with her family at age 6. Now Blattermann, who knows Kathy and Lou Mangione socially, said she mourns for the Thompson family, as well as for the Mangiones and Zanninos.
Over the past year, the family was at a loss for where Luigi was or what he was doing, according to the people close to the Mangiones. In the fall, his relatives emailed many of his friends to seek their help. One friend posted to Luigi on X, “Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.” In November, his mother reportedly called the San Francisco Police Department to report her son missing.
“She would have done everything to find her son and couldn’t,” said one of those close to the Mangiones.
It isn’t known if any member of the family recognized or called police to identify the man in the pictures circulated by the New York Police Department within a day of Thompson being killed.
Police didn’t have Mangione’s name before Monday, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a press conference this week. Asked in a televised interview Wednesday whether the family knew he was on the run, two police officials said they were still vetting the hundreds of tips that poured in.
Luigi Mangione didn’t have UnitedHealthcare insurance, nor did his mother, according to a company spokesman, who didn’t provide information about the father.
The Mangiones, their relationship with Luigi, their mindset as the manhunt unfolded, and their legal and personal road ahead have spurred intense interest nationwide, especially in Baltimore, according to many residents.
Camera crews have staked out Mangione family homes and businesses. “It’s because the family is so prominent. It’s kind of a shock for the system in town,” said Tony Lombardi , an online publisher of news about the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles who knows some of the Mangiones. In a Facebook post Tuesday, Lombardi pleaded with people to “have compassion.”
“You can’t control your children,” he wrote. “You can only set an example and hopefully provide them with principles that become the foundation upon which they live their lives independently.” Hundreds of people replied. Many said they know the Mangiones, and the vast majority expressed empathy for the family.
“I’m also appalled to hear people cheering” for Luigi Mangione, one person wrote, of those celebrating him as a quasi-folk hero who fought back against for-profit health insurance. Another commenter suggested the family must have recognized their son in the police photos—the kind of speculation Lombardi hoped to fend off. He himself has thought about how he might react as a parent in those shoes.
“I’d probably look at that picture and say ‘it might not be him, it couldn’t be him,’ ” he said.
Grasso, a 73-year-old retired police detective, is confident Lou and Kathy Mangione were blindsided by their son’s arrest, given how relaxed they looked Sunday afternoon at St. Leo’s, where Kathy’s brother Charles Zannino was honored by a women’s church group.
“It seemed to me that they were just in a normal life mode,” Grasso said. “I know them well enough that if something was bugging them or eating them, I would have known.”
Mangione was arrested Monday morning after being recognized by a customer at a McDonald’s. By that afternoon, his name was everywhere. Members of his family didn’t appear to be present for his initial court appearances.
There are indications he had been distancing himself from his family at least a year before cutting ties, based on interviews, posts bearing his name on the Goodreads book-review site and on Reddit posts thought to have been written by Mangione, with a handle matching other posts attributed to him.
He had joined Reddit as a teenager, mostly to compare notes about the mobile game Pokémon Go. Over time, he increasingly sought out the counsel of strangers, particularly about a coterie of ailments that he said doctors couldn’t provide answers for. He was plagued by brain fog, which he said seemed to linger for months after a bout of heavy drinking during his fraternity’s “hell week.” He also had a baffling gut ailment and a chronic back condition, which was frequently debilitating.
“The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms—they certainly don’t for me,” he wrote.
A few months after surgery on his back in late July 2023, he left for a trek around Asia, according to photos shared by travelers he met and his own posts on Reddit. One was a how-to primer on traveling indefinitely out of a lone backpack. He had recently added several self-help books to his “to read” list on Goodreads, including “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents.”
One of the last books he added was on Nov. 18, a week or so before detectives say he arrived in New York. It was Goethe’s “Faust,” the German legend about a man who abandoned his past.
Write to Scott Calvert at scott.calvert@wsj.com , Valerie Bauerlein at Valerie.Bauerlein@wsj.com and Jim Carlton at Jim.Carlton@wsj.com
