‘Deeply Emotional’: Luigi Mangione’s Friends React to His Guilty Plea

On Friday, Luigi Mangione confessed to stalking and killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street in Dec. 2024. Since the shooting, Mangione has become a nationally recognized figure, and for some he is a symbol of violent retaliation against a broken healthcare system. Throughout the swirl of attention on him, though, his friends and family have remained largely silent.

While in Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Brooklyn known for housing inmates such as Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried, Mangione has stayed in touch with some friends. Mangione didn’t have any friends or family in federal court Friday, but friends who spoke with Rolling Stone say they were unaware he was planning to submit a guilty plea. His federal trial was set to begin in Jan. 2027, and the state trial was scheduled for next month.

“Friday was deeply emotional,” says R.J. Martin, Mangione’s friend and former landlord in Hawaii, where Mangione lived after college. “Beyond the noise, Luigi is a human being with a circle of longtime friends who know who he is, stay in touch, and care about him deeply.”

Martin believes, “Luigi was declared guilty by our government from the start,” and he adds that would make “a truly fair trial difficult to imagine.”

Other friends of Mangione’s say they were surprised to hear he was pleading guilty as opposed to seeing how at least one of his upcoming trials would play out with a jury. Many expressed their sadness at knowing their friend would likely spend much of his life incarcerated, but declined to comment on the record.

A former friend of Mangione’s who did extracurricular computer programming with Mangione in high school says he found it “really weird” to hear the guilty plea, calling it a “stark shift” from the Mangione he used to know.

“He never struck me as a political person,” says R.K., who asked to use only his initials. “I think it speaks to the radicalization in this country in the current day.”

R.K. says he finds the crime “unacceptable and deeply sad” but says he hopes the guilty plea doesn’t stop the conversation about Americans’ frustration with the healthcare system. “I’ve experienced the difference firsthand as a foreigner living in this country,” says R.K.

When Mangione was first arrested as the shooting suspect in Dec. 2024, the cellphones of his classmates at Gilman, the prestigious high school in Baltimore he attended, started blowing up with students messaging each other. “Did you see the news?” “OMG, Luigi?!” “I can’t believe it.”

“Luigi was in this crew of kids that you knew were going to an Ivy and were going to do groundbreaking science research,” one of his high school classmates told Rolling Stone in 2024, shortly after he was accused of the crime. “But Luigi was the only one [of them] you could shoot the shit with. Once you got him talking, he had all of the kind of suave, cool-guy vibes.”

“Luigi was always chasing perfection, because that was his identity: being smart,” said Mangione’s former high school teacher, who thought Mangione would grow up to work in a science lab or build AI models. His friends in Hawaii remember him as thoughtful, kind, and compassionate.

After Mangione was arrested in Dec. 2024, his family went on lockdown; his parents stopped opening their mail, and his sisters deleted their social media accounts. Friends dropped off baked goods at their home. “We only know what we have read in the media,” the Mangione family said in a statement released Dec. 9, 2024. “Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest. We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson, and we ask people to pray for all involved. We are devastated by this news.”

It is the Mangione family’s only public statement to date.

Over the past year and a half, Mangione has garnered international support from fans and health care activists alike. Since his guilty plea on Friday, his supporters have expressed disappointment, confusion, sadness, and frustration, with many of them saying they wished Mangione had gone to trial in order to draw more awareness to flaws in the American healthcare system.

Mangione pled guilty in federal court to two charges of stalking, which resulted in the death of Thompson, who was in Manhattan for a conference. During his plea, Mangione took a few digs at the health insurance industry while making his longest public comments on the matter.

“After years of enduring severe pain from a broken back, navigating the obstacles of the health insurance system and witnessing similar experiences of countless others,” said Mangione, reading stoically and methodically. “I learned that United Healthcare would be holding its annual investor conference in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024.”

Mangione revealed that in order to get more information about the location of the conference, he emailed UnitedHealthcare leadership posing as an investor at a firm managing more than $50 billion in assets. “Unlike my previous interactions with insurers, I received an immediate response within an hour,” Mangione said in federal court on Friday. As he spoke, Thompson’s family watched from the front row, sitting behind federal prosecutors.

Later, the Thompson family released a statement saying, “While nothing will ease the pain of losing [Thompson], we are grateful that the federal justice system has held the person responsible for this heinous act accountable. Now we look to the court to ensure that sentencing reflects the severity of this crime.”

Mangione’s next state hearing was moved back from Sept. 8 to Dec. 10. His state trial was supposed to begin next month, but his legal team has filed a motion to dismiss the murder case on the grounds of double jeopardy. The state prosecution will respond, and then New York State Supreme Court Judge Gregory Carro is expected to rule on the motion in December.

As far as his federal guilty plea, Judge Margaret Garnett has scheduled a sentencing hearing for Dec. 18.