Luigi Mangione appeared to clench his fist in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Dec. 8 — then lowered his gaze as jurors watched bodycam footage of police pulling a loaded magazine wrapped in wet underwear from his backpack.
Mangione, 27, was in court for the fourth straight day of lengthy evidence suppression hearings ahead of his upcoming trial for allegedly killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, last December in Midtown Manhattan. Monday’s appearance came after he called in sick with an unspecified illness on Friday.
Wearing a grey suit and blue shirt, Mangione entered the courtroom and took his place beside his attorney. At one point during their conversation, he lifted his fist in what looked like a tense gesture.
But his demeanor shifted when Altoona, Pa., Police Officer Christy Wasser — the officer who first searched his backpack — took the stand. As she testified and her bodycam footage played on monitors around the courtroom, Mangione mostly looked down, scribbling on court papers or quietly conferring with his lawyers instead of watching the video.
In earlier hearings, he had watched bodycam footage of his arrest much more intently.
Wasser’s testimony is central to the suppression hearings. Investigators say they found a 3D-printed 9mm pistol and a handwritten “manifesto” denouncing the health insurance industry in Mangione’s backpack. His defense team argues those items were obtained through an illegal, warrantless search and should be thrown out.
If that evidence is suppressed, it would be a major victory for the defense, potentially weakening prosecutors’ ability to prove Mangione possessed the gun allegedly used to kill Thompson — or that he had a clear motive.
In the bodycam video, Wasser is seen wearing gloves as she methodically searches a black backpack while Mangione stands nearby in handcuffs. She pulls out a knife, a sandwich, a loaf of bread, a mobile phone and a passport in a signal-blocking “Faraday bag,” and eventually a fully loaded magazine wrapped in wet underwear.
Wasser can be seen smiling as she holds up the magazine, while another officer off-camera is heard saying, “it’s f—ing him, 100%.”
Immediately afterward, the footage shows officers debating whether they needed a warrant to continue searching the bag, with most concluding they did not. On camera and on the stand, Wasser testified that she feared the backpack might contain a bomb and did not want to repeat an earlier incident involving another Altoona officer named Moser, who had inadvertently brought a suspected explosive device back to the station.
Roughly 15 minutes later at the police station, Wasser sets the backpack on a chair and opens a side pocket, where she finds a handgun. She later moves the bag into another room, digs beneath the underwear and exclaims, “oh my god,” as she uncovers a suppressor. She also locates a red notebook that she and prosecutors describe as Mangione’s manifesto.
Investigators additionally recovered SIM cards and a hand-drawn map of Pittsburgh from the bag, marked with a checklist that referenced red-eye flights to Columbus or Cincinnati and a note about breaking security camera “continuity.”
Mangione has previously watched in court as Altoona police officers who arrested him — and prison guards who monitored and spoke with him during his time in solitary confinement — testified under oath.
He and a group of supporters, many of them young women dressed in green, have also sat through prosecutors’ presentation of surveillance footage of Thompson’s shooting, the 911 call from a McDonald’s that led to Mangione’s arrest, and bodycam recordings from both his arrest and subsequent interrogation.
Mangione has pleaded not guilty to both state charges and concurrent federal murder charges. The federal case carries the possibility of the death penalty if he is convicted. He is currently being held pretrial at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
