Behind the story of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old Italian American arrested for the murder of Brian Thompsonthere is also that of a “desperate” family who had had no news of the boy “who disappeared from circulation without communicating with anyone” for over eight months. Mangione, an Engineering graduate from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, recounted on Reddit some of the sensations and thoughts that have passed through him in the last two years, in which after graduating, he gave up his job, faced the difficult back operation, retreated to Hawaii and traveled to Asia. In one of his last contacts with the outside world, before the isolation, last April 25th Mangione said to a friend met while traveling wanting to “do a little Zen” inspired by the nature around Nara.
The missing person report
People close to the family revealed to the WSJ that Kathy Mangione searched for her missing son Luigi for almost a year. The days preceding the arrest in Altoona (Pa), Kathy lived normally: on Saturday she had lunch with friends in an Italian market on the Baltimore waterfront, the following afternoon, she went with her husband Lou Mangione to a ceremony in a church in Little Italy. The Mangiones had not heard from Luigi for some time, and in the fall they emailed several of his friends asking for help. A friend wrote to Luigi on X: “Hey, are you okay? No one has heard from you for months and apparently your family is looking for you.” In November, the mother allegedly called the San Francisco Police Department to report the disappearance of his son.
The physical problems
The New York Times tried to reconstruct Mangione’s last two years through posts and comments on Reddit and book reviews on Goodreads. Mangione joined Reddit as a teenager, initially just to share tips on the mobile game Pokémon Go. As time went on, he began using the platform primarily to talk and seek comfort about the physical problems that plagued his mind and bodyand to which doctors could not find an answer. As he progressed, his messages became increasingly darker, and he admitted to having an addiction to his smartphone and social media.
Mangione’s physical condition worsened significantly during his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined a fraternity of males who avoided parties to concentrate on their studies. He wrote on social media that a “week of hell” at his fraternity had compromised his sleep cycle and made it drastically worse the “brain fog” symptoms he had experienced since high school. What had once been a minor disorientation, he wrote, was now ruining his life. “It is absolutely brutal to have a problem that makes you suffer, especially because the problem itself wears out the critical/logical mind that is usually used to deal with it – he wrote -. The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms, and they certainly won’t understand me.”
Work and travel in Japan
In early 2023, he resigned from his position as a software engineer at TrueCar in Santa Monica, telling a friend that the work, although profitable, was “deadly boring” and wanted to spend more time doing yoga and reading, which is why he moved to Hawaii. In the summer of 2023, he decided it was time to have surgery, and he returned to the East Coast. Since then he has begun encouraging others to consider surgery, even ignoring doctors’ advice. He also suggested users tell their doctor that their back problems were preventing them from working. “We live in a capitalist society,” he wrote. “I have found that the medical industry responds to these keywords with much more urgency than when you describe unbearable pain and how it is affecting your quality of life.”
After the surgery, Mangione returned to Hawaii, visited family in Maryland and then, earlier this year, went on an extended trip to Asia, which took him to Thailand and Japan. He described Japan’s densely urban environment as “an evolutionary misfit for the human animal.” As a mountain lover, his goal in Asia was to “do a bit of Buddha”. He described his trips to Nara with enthusiasm. “There are like these little villages here, on the side of the cliffs: I’ll send you a photo. It’s super lush, there’s this beautiful river that runs through the gorge – he said in an audio message last April – I think I would like to stay here for a month, and just meditate and go to spas, and write a little.”
On May 25, Mangione’s Reddit account published its final post, a video on a subreddit dedicated to Mr. Kaczynski. The footage, titled “Streaming Overdose 2024, China,” showed dozens of people lined up along sidewalks, livestreaming themselves. More or less from that moment, contact between Luigi and his family stopped. After months of silence, on November 18, Mangione’s family reported his disappearance in California. Just a few days later, police say, Mangione boarded a bus in Atlanta headed to New York City.