‘Worried’ Fam of Luigi Mangione Hired Private Eye After He Cut Them Off

Concerned loved ones of Luigi Mangione hired a private investigator after he cut off most of his family sometime in 2023, a friend has claimed.

The pal of the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s alleged murderer said Mangione still couldn’t be tracked down by the investigator, the Daily Mail reported, raising more questions about what the 26-year-old had been up to in recent months.

“He wasn’t talking with his family and nobody could find him,” the friend said. “They hired a private investigator, they were so worried.”

Those claims track with what other loved ones of Mangione have shared publicly, but police in San Fransisco told the San Fransisco Chronicle that Mangione’s mom, Kathleen, said she’d spoken to her son as recently as July of this year.

Kathleen reported her son missing in San Francisco on Nov. 18, about two weeks before the 50-year-old Brian Thompson was gunned down on a Manhattan sidewalk.

A missing person’s case was opened and a detective in the city claims to have recognized Mangione—thanks to wanted posters released by the NYPD—days before his arrest at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday. The Chronicle reported that the FBI was then notified of Mangione’s potential ties to the case, but the NYPD says they never got word from the west coast.

Mangione’s former classmate at a pricey Maryland prep school, where Mangione was his class’ valedictorian, told the Mail that his whiz kid friend had been struggling with an injury that required pain meds.

“There was some sort of accident,” the friend said. “I knew he was hurt some time ago and that led to the painkiller thing, and then the whole family issue.”

An accident has been frequently mentioned by others close to Mangione, too. His former landlord in Hawaii told CNN that Mangione’s once-nagging back injury became a full-time nuisance in 2022 after he took a hard fall while surfing. The incident left him bedridden for a week and unable to be intimate.

Mangione had surgery to fix the ailment the following summer, which required screws being placed into his lower spine. He initially hailed that procedure as a success on his Reddit page, but those close to him have theorized that the pain likely returned.

Mangione, who reportedly bounced between living in San Francisco and Honolulu in recent years, appears to have gone radio silent on social media this summer. Before then, he’d been a regular poster on X, Reddit, and on a Goodreads account where he logged reads of everything from the Unabomber’s manifesto to Dr. Seuss.

His friend who spoke to the Mail said he last ran into Mangione two years ago in Baltimore. Even back then, the friend said that “something was off” about Mangione, but he chalked it up to him growing older.

“He said he was taking a break from some things,” the friend said. “His voice was much deeper and a lot more serious and toned down.”

Not long after that, word had reportedly gotten out that Mangione—a member of a prominent Maryland family—had become estranged from his family. Chatter broke out between classmates as to what might have happened.

“In our class, we heard a bunch of reasons why,” a friend told the Mail. “People said ‘I think it’s drugs,’ or ‘he’s probably depressed,’ or whatever. But we never discussed it further than that. You start to rethink every single conversation you had, just to try to piece things together.”