In a new legal document Luigi MangioneThe defense team argues there is no evidence that his mother told law enforcement that the United Healthcare shooting was something she could see her son doing.
At a press conference on December 17, 2024, a week after Mangione's arrest, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenney referred to information about a conversation between law enforcement and Mangione's mother, Kathy Mangione. According to a transcript of the press conference, Kenney described how a San Francisco officer working on a missing person's report contacted the FBI about crime photos being circulated by the NYPD during a five-day manhunt. They believed there were similarities between the photographs of the suspects and the missing person case they were working on. Luigi Mangione.
Kenny went on to say that while verifying this information, law enforcement approached Mangione's mother and had a conversation “in which she did not indicate that it was her son in the photo, but said that she may have seen him do it.”
Mangione's lead attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, filed a document last night arguing that the defense has not yet received evidence to support that claim. Friedman Agnifilo notes that this quote has been widely quoted by several news outlets, including CBS, People, And Newsweekalong with book about Mangion this was published just last week. Fox News The article was headlined: “Luigi Mangione's mom makes shocking confession to police.”
Mangione's family has famously remained silent since his arrest, issuing just one statement through a family representative to the media. So his mother's quote was the only word attributed to her—or anyone in Mangione's immediate family—last year.
“All discoveries presented to date indicate that she made no such claim,” Friedman Agnifilo wrote in a recent filing. “If it is true that Ms. Mangione never made this statement, then it is shocking and unconscionable that the District Attorney's Office and the NYPD have never corrected this extremely harmful false statement.”
The Mangione family and the NYPD did not immediately respond to Rolling Stonerequest for comments. The prosecutor's office declined to comment and said it would respond in court.
Last spring Rolling Stone spoke with the San Francisco detective who first named Mangione as the prime suspect. San Francisco Police Sgt. Michael Horan told us he spoke with the FBI agent who worked the United Healthcare shooting and sent them a missing person's report on Mangione along with images of himself on social media.
Horan said that after he realized Mangione resembled the shooting suspect, one of his co-workers called Mangione's sister. Horan said the investigator didn't mention the shooting during that call — they were just calling to see if his family could bring up the shooting on their own. Horan said the sister never gave any information about the suspect in the shooting; she just talked about how her brother disappeared.
Horan remembers coming to work a few days later, on Monday, Dec. 9, to hear that a suspect had been arrested in the UHC shooting. After learning the news, Horan called the FBI again, and he remembers that they praised him for a job well done.
“[The case agent] told me they spoke to his mom at some point over the weekend before he was detained,” Horan added.
In his statement last night, Friedman Agnifilo also noted that Mangione has not yet received a laptop and hard drive to address this discovery in time for the next hearing in New York State on December 1.
