The man who allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson a week ago was arraigned and charged on Monday with five crimes at the Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.

Luigi Mangione, 26, was arrested at a McDonald’s a few miles away in Altoona on Monday morning, after he was recognized by a customer who notified staff, who then called local police. Mangione’s arrest brought to an end a five day manhunt for the gunman who was captured on surveillance video shooting Thompson in the back on a New York City street early in the morning of December 4.

The charges in Pennsylvania include forgery, carrying a firearm without a license, tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of crime and false identification to law enforcement authorities.

The police complaint alleges the suspect provided a false New Jersey driver’s license as identification and “started to shake” when asked if he had been to New York recently. The complaint also included a description of the so-called ghost gun—a weapon not registered with authorities—which was apparently home-made.

When they searched Mangione’s backpack, the complaint states, “Officers located a black 3D-printed pistol and a black silencer. … The pistol had one loaded Glock magazine with six nine-millimeter full metal jacket rounds. … The silencer was also 3D printed.”

On Tuesday, Mangione appeared in the county courthouse a second time, represented by his attorney Thomas Dickey, where he was denied bail. New York prosecutors filed an arrest warrant on Tuesday and are seeking Mangione’s extradition to face charges in that state 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.

The New York charges are class A-1 felonies and carry the possibility of a life sentence.

Attorney Dickey, who has been hired to represent the defendant, said that he will fight the extradition and has requested a hearing on the matter. An appearance has been scheduled by the court in two weeks while Mangione is being held at State Correctional Institution Huntingdon, the oldest state prison in Pennsylvania.

On his way from the police cruiser to the courtroom on Tuesday, wearing an orange jumpsuit, Mangione was recorded by news media yelling out, “This is completely unjust and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.”

Luigi Mangione is a member of a well-known, conservative and wealthy family in the Baltimore area. His grandfather, Nicholas Mangione, Sr., was a real estate developer and owned country clubs, nursing homes and a radio station. The family owns significant real estate in Maryland including Turf Valley Resort, a sprawling luxury retreat and conference center outside Baltimore, and Hayfields Country Club overlooking the Oregon Ridge, in Hunt Valley, Maryland.

A statement was released on behalf of the Mangione family that said they “only know what we have read in the media” and that they were “shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest.”

Luigi Mangione attended and was the class of 2016 valedictorian at the prestigious, private Gilman School in Baltimore, where he wrestled and played other sports. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Ivy League school in computer engineering.

News reports have said that Mangione suffered from severe back pain from his childhood that interfered with his quality of life. ABC News reported, “An image posted to a social media account linked to Mangione showed what appeared to be an X-ray of a metal rod and multiple screws inserted into someone's lower spine.”

After college, Mangione worked for a short time for the car-buying website TrueCar. ABC News reported that from January to June 2022, Mangione lived at Surfbreak, a “co-living” space at the edge of touristy Waikiki in Honolulu. The report said he left Surfbreak to get surgery on the mainland and later returned to Honolulu and rented an apartment.

From this point forward, Mangione’s associations and whereabouts are sketchy. According to a report in the New York Times, he was in regular contact with friends and family “until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering from a painful back injury, friends said, and then went dark.”

Less than one month before the New York City shooting, Mangione was reported missing by his mother to the San Francisco Police Department.

Investigators have recovered a three-page statement, referred to in the news media as a “manifesto,” allegedly written by Mangione concerning the shooting of Thompson, as well as lists and “to-do” items in a spiral notebook.

Although major corporate news outlets have declined to publish the document, blogger Ken Klippenstein has posted Mangione’s statement in full online. The statement says, in part, that UnitedHealthcare is the “largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but has our life expectancy?”

It goes on to say the companies “have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”

The prior outpouring of hostility toward the health insurance industry and unsympathetic response to the death of Thompson on social media has now transitioned into support for Mangione as a vigilante and “hero.”

Both the shooting death of Thompson and the public response to it, as the World Socialist Web Site explained on Monday, have revealed certain realities about life in America that have been covered up by the media for many decades with “a ton of self-delusion, lies and stupidities.”

There is seething anger and hostility among tens of millions of people in the US—not to mention billions around the world—over the conditions of inequality and brutal indifference to suffering that is endemic and a necessary feature of the capitalist system.

There is no outlet for this anger and opposition to social inequality within the American political establishment and its two parties of the billionaire elite. This vacuum has created conditions for incidents such as a highly compensated corporate executive being murdered on his way to an investor conference in New York City.

However, the actions of Mangione and the enthusiastic support for him—including some who are hailing him as a people’s vigilante—cut across what is necessary to change the conditions and, in the end, serve to bolster the capitalist system and its state apparatus of repression and violence.

What is required is a genuine mass political movement of the working class aimed at putting an end to the private ownership and control of the health care system—along with all basic economic resources—and their revolutionary transformation into public resources operated on a socialist basis to provide for the needs of society as a whole.