NEW YORK — The day after a masked gunman killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in New York City, police in San Francisco gave the FBI a potentially valuable tip about the identity of the suspect: He looked like a man who had been reported missing to them the previous month, Luigi Mangione.
San Francisco police provided Mangione’s name to the FBI on Dec. 5, according to a law enforcement official was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
That was the day the NYPD released surveillance images showing the face of the suspected shooter as he checked into a Manhattan hostel.
“Among multiple tips received by FBI New York from the public and law enforcement regarding the homicide in Midtown Manhattan on December 4, 2024, a tip was received from the San Francisco Police Department regarding the possible identity of the suspect,” the FBI confirmed in a statement Friday.
The FBI statement didn’t provide further detail about the nature of the tip or say when it was received but said agents in New York had “conducted routine investigative activity and referred this and other leads to the New York City Police Department.”
Mangione was arrested Monday, Dec. 9, after an employee at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, phoned police saying that there was a person eating breakfast in the restaurant who looked like the person being sought as the gunman.
The NYPD’s chief of detectives, Joseph Kenny, said at the time that the department’s investigators didn’t have Mangione’s name until he turned up in that McDonald’s.
A message seeking comment was left with the NYPD Friday.
The San Francisco department’s tip to the FBI was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was ambushed and fatally shot outside a hotel where his company was holding its annual investor conference.
The leader of the insurer’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, described Thompson as kind and brilliant Friday in a guest essay published in The Ne