Political Tribune

Crime, Health Care, Healthcare

Luigi Mangione’s Former College Classmate Breaks His Silence, Reveals What He Was Really Like In School

He had a bright future. Now it's looking very dim.

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597 points

Before bursting into the national spotlight, Luigi Mangioni lived a quiet but remarkable life, graduating as class valedictorian at The Gilman School, a Baltimore-based school for boys. He is, by all accounts highly intelligent, having founded Penn’s Game Research and Development Environment, also called UPGRADE. The club, which developed games aimed to “foster creative expression and cultivate career skills for the artists, programmers, and creatives interested in game development in the Penn community” The club soon grew to 50 members, The Daily Pennsylvanian reports.

Along the way, the young man, who is only 26, earned a Bachelor’s degree and Master’s Degree in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, The New York Times reports.

But now the usually quiet kid has been arrested for allegedly shooting and killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. As is typical in these kinds of cases, folks who knew Mangione are shocked.

This includes Henry Smyth, the Head of Gilman School, who wrote in an email to the school community that they didn’t have any information other than what was being reported in the news, The Baltimore Banner reports.

“This is deeply distressing news on top of an already awful situation. Our hearts go out to everyone affected,” he said.

Mangione’s Gilman classmate Freddie Leatherbury said hearing the news was a “total shock.”

”He was a smart kid, he was a nice kid and he was relatively unassuming,” Leatherbury told The Pennsylvanian. “He had a healthy social circle and was very well-read. He had a lot going for him.”

It’s been a “surreal” situation, he added.

Even though the two weren’t close friends in school, Leatherbury said he was still upset to hear the news.

He and Mangione weren’t close friends in school, but Leatherbury said he was still upset to hear the news.”I guess he just got caught up in some ideologies after school. Something has to go pretty wrong to lead to this.”

It’s hard to know what Mangione’s motives were in the shooting but scores of people have weighed in on social media and their empathy for a young man who destroyed his future is pretty strong. And most of the commentary highlights the fact that this was an incredibly intelligent young man with fairly normal habits. Except for the fact that he followed Ted Kaczynski and believed “violence is necessary” if we want change.

In the meantime, as you might expect, Mangione’s X account has been suspended, but the shock displayed by those who knew him is still palpable. A description of Gilman’s 2016 graduation ceremonies revealed that school officials described him as inventive, with “incredible courage to explore the unknown and try new things.”

in a speech at the Gilman School Founder’s Day Ceremony in 2016, Mangione referred to experiences he’d had in the classroom, including the school production of The Addams Family, or the time a rival school was beaten in a football game.

“Luigi is the best and deserves the best,” said Race Saunders, a former classmate of Mangione’s at Gilman.

While he was studying engineering at the University of Pennsylvania he was featured on Penn Today, the university’s news blog, where he talked about starting a club that developed video games.

”In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” Mangione, a junior at the time, said. “In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I learned [on my own] how to program, and that’s why I’m a computer science major now; that’s how I got into it.”

How sad. Mangione is a brilliant young man who just threw his life away. I think he’ll be convicted and probably spend his life in prison. I don’t see any other way around this. I’m conflicted about his alleged shooting of Thompson but don’t know if he was worth someone throwing their entire life away.

Featured image via screengrab


Megan Hamilton

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Megan Colleen Hamilton was born and raised on progressive politics and she has long fought for liberal causes. She has lived in the Pacific Northwest, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, parts of Mexico, and now Central America. Her travels have further informed her progressive beliefs in these troubled times. She is currently owned by 10 cats, two dogs, and one naughty rabbit. She actually is one of those “childless cat ladies.”

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