They added: “We are devastated by this news.”
The statement was released late Monday by Nino Mangione, a Republican state representative for Baltimore County, Maryland, where Luigi Mangione grew up attending a prestigious private school before decamping for the University of Pennsylvania to study computer science.
The wealthy Mangione family is known in the Baltimore area for their ownership of the Hayfields Country Club, a nursing home called Lorien Health Services and a conservative radio station.
Mangione’s turn from a life of privilege and promise may have been precipitated by his own health problems. A social media profile apparently belonging to him shows an X-ray of four large pins securing a man’s spine, and a Goodreads profile for a user named Luigi Mangione indicates he had sought out books on back pain. A friend told CNN that when Mangione was living in Hawaii in 2022, he ended up “in bed for about a week” after a surfing expedition went wrong.
“It was really traumatic and difficult, you know, when you’re in your early twenties and you can’t, you know, do some basic things,” the friend, R.J. Martin, told the outlet.
The New York Post also reported that Mangione was upset by the way the U.S. health care system had treated a sick relative, citing police sources.
Acting on a tip, law enforcement arrested Mangione on Monday at a McDonald’s restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a small city east of Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania authorities booked him on charges of possessing a so-called “ghost gun,” or a weapon cobbled together from pieces assembled by the user at home, along with a silencer and fake identification.
