S3 Ep258: Crime Weekly News: Brian Thompson Homicide Suspect Identified as Luigi Mangione

In the early morning of December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson was gunned down by a masked man in the streets of New York City. He was the CEO of health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, and in the aftermath of his killing, opinions on his death are fiercely divided. After a 6 day manhunt, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested for Brian's murder, and the tension in America is only rising. Try our coffee!! - www. CriminalCoffeeCo.comBecome a Patreon member -- > ｿ https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeeklyShop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> ｿ https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shopYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcastWebsite: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.comInstagram: @CrimeWeeklyPodTwitter: @CrimeWeeklyPodFacebook: @CrimeWeeklyPodADS:1. PDSDebt.com/CrimeWeekly - Get your FREE debt analysis today!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:14Derrick Levasseur?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Crime Weekly News. I'm Derrick Levasseur.

• 1:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I'm Stephanie Harlow.

• 1:19Derrick Levasseur?

  And we're not going to waste any time. There was actually a lot to talk about this week in Crime Weekly News. Some weeks were like, all right, what do you want to cover? This week, there was a ton. You had the allegations against Jay-Z, you had the Danielle Penny incident with the charges being reduced there as well, or being thrown out, the manslaughter charge being thrown out. And then you also had what we're going to talk about tonight, because there have been a lot of developments very quickly. And I think it started many interesting conversations, not only based on what happened here, but how the public is responding to it. It's very interesting. So, for anybody who doesn't know, just a quick little recap here. Brian Thompson, who was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare since April of 2021, was shot and killed

• 2:04Derrick Levasseur?

  outside the entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, New York City on December 4th, 2024. Now, he was there to attend an annual investors meeting for the UnitedHealth Group, which is the parent company of UnitedHealthcare. So, this was crazy. And when I saw this, the fact that it was caught on camera, it was being shown everywhere. And again, a lot of conversations about it, there's been many developments in it. How do you want to structure this, Stephanie? Do you want to just go over some more details about what was found, evidence, etc. And we'll just go through the video, all that, and then we can talk about what the recent development of the identification, which you guys know from the thumbnail?

• 2:41Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yes, so as of December 9th, a person of interest was arrested, is being questioned, and we're going to talk about him at the end of this. We're going to kind of come back to it and wrap around. But basically, what happened is this occurred in the early morning hours, and the suspect fled the scene. I do want to talk about the public's reaction to this, but first I want to give a quick kind of timeline about what exactly happened and what we've known. So it looks like the suspect arrived in New York to the Port Authority bus terminal at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue around 10:00, 11:00 p.m. on November 24th.

• 3:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  So they said that bus originated in Atlanta, and then the suspect got into a cab, and that took him to the vicinity of the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel. He stayed there for about a half an hour. At 11:00 p.m., he took another cab to a hostel located on Amsterdam Avenue, which is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then on Friday, November 29th, the suspect checked out of the hostel. He went back and checked into the hostel again on November 30th, the following day. Now, Monday, December 2nd, that's when the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, arrived in New York. Now, on Wednesday, December 4th, around 5:30 a.m., the suspect once again left the hostel. They believe it was by e-bike.

• 4:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  At 5:41 a.m., he was seen wandering around the vicinity of the New York Hilton Midtown on 6th Avenue. He goes back and forth for a bit before he headed towards a Starbucks. And then at 6:17 a.m., images from that Starbucks showed him buying a bottle of water and two energy bars roughly 30 minutes before the shooting, according to law enforcement. And there's lots of surveillance footage of him, there's lots of captures. He's usually got his face pretty much hidden by a big hood that's on his jacket. At 6:19 a.m., surveillance video near a deli on West 55th Street appears to show the suspect walking and briefly stopping by a pile of trash. He's got like a gray book bag on. Around 6:30 a.m., surveillance video captures what appears to be the gunman and

• 4:55Stephanie Harlowe?

  he's on the phone. He's still got his big black coat on. He's still got a gray book bag on.

• 4:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Is it black or like green? It almost looks green to me.

• 5:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  What, the coat?

• 5:02Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 5:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  It looks black to me. It could be black or like an olive green.

• 5:06Derrick Levasseur?

  I was seeing that that jacket actually has been flying off the shelves now.

• 5:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  The jacket he's wearing?

• 5:11Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's so weird, dude.

• 5:12Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, but I think it's green. But you know what? Black blue dress. It's the black blue dress thing.

• 5:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, it could be like an olive green. It's dark. It's dark colored.

• 5:19Derrick Levasseur?

  I just have more style than you, I guess. I don't know.

• 5:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  I don't know. I I'm not gonna buy the coat, but maybe you should.

• 5:24Derrick Levasseur?

  I wait. So you're saying I should return it?

• 5:26Stephanie Harlowe?

  You did? You bought it already?

• 5:27Derrick Levasseur?

  No!

• 5:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Derek's like, it's been flying off the shelves. I know, because I tried to buy it.

• 5:31Derrick Levasseur?

  I tried to get my size. I didn't have it.

• 5:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  So at 6:44 a.m., Brian Thompson, the victim, he walks towards the Hilton after leaving his hotel, which was across the street. Now, at that point, the masked gunman was lying in wait outside the hotel as Thompson made his way to attend his company's annual investor conference, which apparently this was sort of a public knowledge thing. Like, if you know where to look, you know to find out that they're having their annual conference there at this hotel.

• 5:57Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep. I was tweeting about this. Yep, absolutely. This was very easy information to find.

• 6:01Stephanie Harlowe?

  So the gunman then walks behind Thompson, and you can see this on video. It's crazy. He shoots him in the back.

• 6:06Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  He then walks towards Thompson, continues to shoot, stopping to clear a gun jam before firing again.

• 6:14Derrick Levasseur?

  So I had tweeted about this. I thought the video was fascinating. But it's a very interesting thing, because you see all these experts online on these different media organizations talking about it. And without calling out any agencies specifically, it's all just speculation at this point, right? We know we know more. And I didn't even know that someone was identified till we started recording this. Stephanie just told me.

• 6:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  Because it just happened. It just happened, yeah.

• 6:37Derrick Levasseur?

  She literally was like, hey, by the way, they found someone. So here's what my observations were as a police officer and someone who is familiar with firearms. I use them all the time. Stephanie knows I have a collection. I like I like guns. But more for the collection of them, but I do shoot them often. What I saw first and foremost was a individual who had some firearms training. By no means a professional, by no means an expert. Uh, because if they had been an expert, they probably would have chosen a different firearm that would have operated more easily. What I saw was more than likely a, a pistol with a silencer to decrease the sound. But also something of low caliber, which without getting to like the details, anyone who knows guns will know this, but there's subsonic rounds. They're, they're smaller rounds, like a 22 caliber gun.

• 7:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Um, that won't rifle, won't cycle through a gun properly because it doesn't have enough power behind it. Which can cause like a jam or stovepipe. A stovepipe would be when the, the shell casing goes to eject. It gets stuck as the slide slides back forward and it can fire another round. There's also been speculation that it could be a slide lock mechanism. Where it intentionally only fires one round at a time and that he knew this was going to happen. Which is why his behavior suggests he was pretty quick with it. So like, some people interpreted his ability to clear that jam so quickly. As someone who is a professional or someone who is in the military or law enforcement, that could have been true.

• 8:04Derrick Levasseur?

  But it also could have been true that if this was a slide lock mechanism and he had practiced with it. The reason he was able to clear it so quickly is because he knew. Because a lot of the times when you're in law enforcement and we have new shooters. The first thing they do when they get a jam is they look at the gun, like what's going on? That's your natural instinct. He really didn't do that. He just cleared it and kept going. So that could have been that he knew that was going to happen or he had a familiarity with it. Or maybe he knew that this had happened in the past.

• 8:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'm sure he's practiced.

• 8:34Derrick Levasseur?

  And he practiced with it. However, something that I wanted to point out. That a lot of people, even the experts didn't, but I thought was interesting. And kind of put a, a, a slash on the side of he's not a professional, not someone who has a lot of experience. When you're shooting a gun for the first time, we, or relatively for your first time, there's something called anticipation. And what happens is you're anticipating the recoil of the firearm and you're countering that. It's your human nature. So what happens, and I apologize for people on audio. Picture me holding up the gun, and I have it up on screen if you're watching here. And what you do, right as you're pulling the trigger, is you go like this. You kinda jerk it forward and you jerk it down.

• 9:18Derrick Levasseur?

  And so it offsets that recoil and what happens is your first shot is usually low. His first shot appears to me to hit him in the thigh or the calf, which suggests some level of anticipation. So I left this video thinking more than likely, this is someone who may have shot a gun before, but didn't necessarily have a, an expertise where they-

• 9:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  Not like a military or law enforcement background.

• 9:46Derrick Levasseur?

  This wasn't, in my opinion, from that video, a professional hit. And you're gonna go on in the timeline about where he went after this and all that stuff, which I think indicates that even more. But the fact that they chose to do it right there in public-

• 9:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, I thought there's a pedestrian standing right there. It's super brazen.

• 10:02Derrick Levasseur?

  Cameras everywhere in New York City.

• 10:03Stephanie Harlowe?

  Like, I mean, like, maybe six, 10 feet away from Brian Thompson, there's a woman standing with her back to the shooter, yeah, but still, very brazen.

• 10:10Derrick Levasseur?

  Here, here's the thing about a professional hit. And this might not be a spoiler alert for a lot of you guys. If it's a professional hit, you're not gonna know it was a professional hit.

• 10:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  You're not gonna, yeah, it's like a ghost.

• 10:23Derrick Levasseur?

  It comes off as a suicide or an accident.

• 10:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Or you just, or you never even just saw any, any mention of this person.

• 10:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Nobody knows anything. This was very, this was very careless and it seemed like the person had a, a story they wanted to tell.

• 10:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, they wanted it to be known.

• 10:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Well, with the shell casings, on the shell casings that were found, it was written, "Delay and deny." And it's a common phrase in the insurance industry to say, "Delay, deny, defend," which is horrible. Horrible that that's the that's the practice. Delay, deny, defend of people who are sick and need help. So right there to me, this screamed personal, not professional. And there was also some people out there that suggested this was a 3D printed gun. Something like they they made at home, something that when you make it on, when you make it your own way, it may not fire correctly because it's plastic or a a high strain like carbon fiber or something. So a lot of speculation about this. Everyone has an opinion on it.

• 11:23Derrick Levasseur?

  And at this point, my only takeaway was more than likely this is someone with an axe to grind, a familiarity with guns, but not necessarily a hired hit. That was my takeaway from the video.

• 11:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  Definitely planned, definitely intentional.

• 11:35Derrick Levasseur?

  1,000%.

• 11:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  So he he he shoots, right? It's it's pretty, it's crazy to see it, by the way. Just it's it's very, it's such a clear surveillance video too, right? It seems like a movie when you're watching a movie. It's hard for the brain to process that what you're watching is something that happened to a real person.

• 11:51Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  But after the shooting, the suspect crosses the street from the Hilton. He fled northbound through an alley and he then got on an electric bike on 55th Street before heading north on 6th Avenue towards Central Park. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 12:09Speaker 00

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• 12:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, so now around 6:46 a.m., 911 responds to Brian Thompson being shot on the street. They arrive to find him on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. He's got gunshot wounds to his back and his leg. He's taken to the hospital. At 6:48, at that exact same time, the suspect is seen riding. An electric bike into Central Park at 60th Street. He rides out of the park at 6:56. And at 7 a.m., he's no longer in the bike, but he is then again walking northbound on 86th Street, and then he gets into a cab at 7:04. Thompson's pronounced dead at the hospital at 7:12 a.m. At 7:30 a.m., the suspect is seen near the George Washington Bridge and a Port Authority Bus Terminal off 178th Street.

• 13:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  So he's getting out of town, right? They said they don't have any, they have video of him entering the station, they don't have video of him exiting, so obviously, they believe he got on a bus. Then on December 6th, the NYPD found a backpack in Central Park that they believe belonged to the suspect. So obviously, they sent it for testing, and for a long time, that was all we knew. But now, just today, just this afternoon, we have somebody who's been arrested and taken into custody, and it is a University of Pennsylvania graduate named Luigi Mangione. This is a 26-year-old man who was being questioned in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and the sources

• 14:10Stephanie Harlowe?

  that we have from this NBC article say that customers in a McDonald's in that area called police after spotting Mangione, who they deemed suspicious. Now, apparently, this dude's got a ton of fake IDs. He, when he was-

• 14:25Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm reading four, four fake IDs.

• 14:27Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah. When he was arrested, they discovered a gun similar to the one used in Brian Thompson's killing, as well as a silencer, and a fake New Jersey ID with the name Mark Rosario on it. So this is most likely how he checked into the hostel, how he got his bus tickets, things like that.

• 14:42Derrick Levasseur?

  Yep.

• 14:42Stephanie Harlowe?

  So he's not gonna, and the great thing is, though, because he, he traveled under assumed names, it would have been very difficult to track him to who he actually was, but because there's so much surveillance video of him, we did get some captures of his face.

• 14:56Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, Starbucks, they had the full, full shot of his face from Starbucks.

• 14:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  But then, and then all these eyewitnesses were able to call police when they saw him.

• 15:03Derrick Levasseur?

  I mean, I will say this, looking at the masked photos of him in the back of the taxi, and then the Starbucks image, now looking at a picture of him on my screen right now, it looks like him to me, especially the eyebrows. The eyebrows really give it away.

• 15:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, I, I definitely believe.

• 15:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  That that this is the the same person.

• 15:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Stephanie Harlowe?

  But.

• 15:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Just on physical appearance, not knowing motive yet, but yeah.

• 15:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  But it's it's weird because it's not the type of person you would think would would do something like this.

• 15:31Derrick Levasseur?

  No.

• 15:31Stephanie Harlowe?

  Right? He was born and raised in Maryland. He was a graduate from Gilman High School in 2016. He was a valedictorian. This was an all-boys school in Baltimore, Maryland. He, they believe he attended college in Pennsylvania. It's really not something, someone specifically that you would think would randomly be be killing a multimillionaire, you know, CEO. However, because of, like you said, the shell casings, the bullets, because of who Brian Thompson was, because of how, I'm not gonna say it.

• 16:06Derrick Levasseur?

  What he represented.

• 16:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  How shitty the, any healthcare companies in the United States are, they're absolutely horrendous.

• 16:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Crooks, crooks, for sure.

• 16:15Stephanie Harlowe?

  Absolute crooks.

• 16:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, multi-billion dollar industry, people are dying.

• 16:20Stephanie Harlowe?

  They insure 49 million Americans and they had 281 billion dollars in revenue from the 2023 fiscal year. We know that under Thompson's leadership, United Healthcare began using AI to automate claim denials. And this resulted in patients being unable to access their needed medical care, that by the way, they pay out the ass for.

• 16:41Derrick Levasseur?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They want you to pay for it, and then when you need it, they're nowhere to be found.

• 16:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, they want you to pay for it, and you do pay for it.

• 16:49Derrick Levasseur?

  But if you need it, whoa, you didn't read the fine print.

• 16:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  And like I said, Derek and I were talking a little bit before we started recording. We've all seen John Keew, it's one of my favorite movies.

• 16:58Derrick Levasseur?

  The best.

• 16:58Stephanie Harlowe?

  Denzel Washington.

• 16:59Derrick Levasseur?

  Shout out Denzel.

• 16:59Stephanie Harlowe?

  Is my favorite actor of all time. I I can understand somebody having a, not just a dislike for these insurance companies, but if you or a family member or a loved one has been affected negatively and people die, people, well insured, fully insured people die because of not having access to the medical care they need.

• 17:21Derrick Levasseur?

  Technicality in their in their coverage.

• 17:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  And this happens so much.

• 17:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Okay, so I can see somebody who maybe had been affected by one of these healthcare companies negatively affected. Having a vendetta like this.

• 17:33Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 17:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  And it's most likely what we're dealing with here.

• 17:35Derrick Levasseur?

  Listen, not even at this scale, but I have to have surgery in a couple of months for a hernia and I went to have a MRI. To make a long story short, because of what I needed, the type of MRI I needed, it wasn't covered.

• 17:48Stephanie Harlowe?

  Nope, it's not.

• 17:49Derrick Levasseur?

  I never, I'm a healthy person, never have it. It cost me almost $2,000. That I had to pay out of pocket just to have an MRI done to confirm the hernia. And it was because it, something that I had an extra thing that I needed that wasn't covered under this policy that I have. And I saw, I thought to myself even then, it's like, I paid thousands of dollars in insurance every month and yet when I need it, there's always a reason why they can't cover, or most of it's not covered. It's a crime. It really is.

• 18:17Stephanie Harlowe?

  Now, let's talk about how the general public, and when I say the general public, I mean, the majority of people have reacted to this case.

• 18:26Derrick Levasseur?

  Before you do that, can I ask one more question? Was there anything? Cause I'm seeing a couple of things here that he might have had a manifesto on him.

• 18:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, they did say that a few sources said that he had a manifesto on him when he was arrested.

• 18:38Derrick Levasseur?

  I don't know how true this is. This is all new.

• 18:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  It hasn't been confirmed as of now.

• 18:40Derrick Levasseur?

  Hasn't been confirmed, but from what I'm seeing, just to put it out there as what we're talking about right now, allegedly, allegedly, he had two grandparents that, there's obituaries that were found for them. He lost his grandmother and his grandfather in 2013 and in 2017. And they're thinking that may somehow be connected to this. Again, that information is subject to change, but based on everything we're saying right now, there's your potential motive. Based on what those grandparents went through, maybe he really, all this time was thinking, this isn't right. I want to make a change. I want to do something. And now to your point about how the country is receiving this story and how they're interpreting it.

• 19:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  A hundred, like it's such a tough thing because. I understand where the outrage comes from. I do. And I don't necessarily disagree with it. I don't, I don't know.

• 19:36Derrick Levasseur?

  You don't disagree with the outrage or the assassination?

• 19:39Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, I don't, I don't disagree with the outrage.

• 19:41Derrick Levasseur?

  I know, I know what you were saying. I wanted to make sure we clarified that, yeah.

• 19:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  I, I, I am somebody that's very much like murder is never the answer kind of thing, you know?

• 19:51Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Stephanie Harlowe?

  But, but also, as an average citizen, when you're battling a multi-billion dollar company like this, obviously, we know that's not possible. What are you gonna do? Bring them to court? They're gonna keep you, they got more money than you, they're gonna keep you in court forever. Nothing's ever gonna come of it. There really isn't a, a nonviolent way to handle this. But do I agree with handling it in a violent way? Not necessarily. However, we do have a lot of public response, which is celebrations, joking about it. And that really does make me feel for, feel really poorly for Brian Thompson's surviving family, his wife, his kids, things like that. And, and where I do draw the line is where we

• 20:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  have people who are just legitimately calling for more of it, right? So, there's a journalist, Taylor Lorenz, she had reposted the photo of another health insurance company CEO with a blank section for a day of death, accompanied by a caption, pondering about whether to send your next to other CEOs who are in the, in the same industry. And, you know, later she's like, oh, I was just explaining what the public sentiment was. I wasn't like calling for violence, but.

• 21:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  You kind of were, okay? Because you know, in general, when, when things are simmering like this, that's probably not the thing you want to do. And once again, understand where the anger comes from. I don't know, it's very, it's very difficult. Like, I'm all about the people rising up. But if you took to the streets, in general, en masse, hundreds of thousands of people all over the United States, and started, you know, Speaking out against this started boycotting, started, you know, making, making noise about it, which I don't believe has ever really been done on a large scale. Maybe that would send a message, right? You know, maybe, maybe you start there. You start with resistance. You start with nonviolent resistance and then, and then see where it goes from there.

• 21:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  And I don't know if there's ever been a huge sort of movement of that type for healthcare companies or against healthcare companies. So I probably want to, want to start there. But yeah, it's, it's very, um, it's very hard to, to watch because you agree and you're not, you're on the same page as these people.

• 22:06Derrick Levasseur?

  You agree with the premise.

• 22:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, but I'm also not going to be out there celebrating anybody's death. It's just not in my, in my nature to do that.

• 22:13Derrick Levasseur?

  So you guys know where I'm going to land on this one. I've said it on numerous cases and I've said it with like, even with more extreme examples like the Menendez brothers and Gypsy Rose where you just can't, you can't be judge, jury, executioner. We can't, we can't, we can't condone that type of behavior because it's going to become the Wild West. Because where does it stop? Is it the CEO? Is it the VP? Is it the person processing your order?

• 22:35Stephanie Harlowe?

  The guy, the guy, the guy who made your coffee wrong?

• 22:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah, you just start killing people when we disagree with their, even though the majority of the country disagrees with it.

• 22:43Stephanie Harlowe?

  Of course.

• 22:44Derrick Levasseur?

  You know, there, it's such a weird place because you have people, we were talking about it before, before the recording, you have the, uh, the lookalike contest being done in, uh, New York right now. And like they were doing with Timothy Chalamet and stuff like, they're treating this guy like a celebrity.

• 22:57Stephanie Harlowe?

  They're treating him like a, um, yeah, like a-

• 23:01Derrick Levasseur?

  Like a hero.

• 23:02Stephanie Harlowe?

  Like a hero.

• 23:03Derrick Levasseur?

  And by the way, because we know media, I'm looking at pictures of this kid, very good looking dude.

• 23:07Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, he's handsome. He's very handsome. Great smile. Yeah.

• 23:10Derrick Levasseur?

  He's smart, good looking. It's already going to be happening online. There's going to be girls fawning over this guy. He is going to be a hero. Uh, I can't believe I'm forgetting the name of, uh, Sarnoy, Sarnoyev, the bomber from Mass, the-

• 23:25Derrick Levasseur?

  The bomber from the Boston Marathon, the kid who was caught.

• 23:28Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, uh, Saranoff?

• 23:30Derrick Levasseur?

  Whatever his name is, you guys know, they put him on the cover of Rolling Stone and this kid makes that guy look like, like Pee-wee Herman. This kid's a very good looking guy. But as far as the premise, yeah, we can't be killing people. And you know, it's so funny because before they identified this guy, I was just reading this article because this video came up on my feed. I don't know if you're familiar with this name, Stephanie, Mary Ann Bachmeier. Do you know the name?

• 23:53Stephanie Harlowe?

  Not off the top of my head, no.

• 23:54Derrick Levasseur?

  Unbelievable. It happened in Germany and I can't remember exactly when it happened. I think it was in the 1980s, but basically, some guy kidnapped her daughter, Anna, raped and murdered her. Okay? There's a video of it. You gotta look it up after this crazy video. Walks into the courtroom with a trench coat on, pulls out a gun, shoots him six or seven times in the chest. Boom, done. Now, I gotta be honest, my natural reaction? Badass. Badass. And you know what? I, I've talked about this before because you guys say sometimes we talk out of both sides of our mouths. Like, we're not condoning it. But it, but if you're gonna do it, I mean, rapists and murderers and child molesters, you know, that, that's the one that I feel the least bad about.

• 24:38Derrick Levasseur?

  Um, but we can't start shooting CEOs of, of insurance companies. We can't do that. And I will say with Mary Ann Bachmeier, because there's really no comparison in my eyes. That's her daughter and she knew exactly what she was doing. She didn't run from it. She walked right to the courtroom. There was no mask. We don't want to create a precedent where we have people going out there like this guy Luigi and just killing the people that they disagree with. Because it just, it's gonna, it's never gonna end well. And I will say one thing that you brought up before we started recording, and I think you gotta mention it here. And not that we were hoping for this, but you were telling me before we started recording that the processing of insurance claims has like doubled or tripled. What were you saying?

• 25:19Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, I forget how much is exactly it is, but in the days since the, the murder assassination, whatever you want to call it, um, healthcare companies have been approving far more claims than they were before.

• 25:32Derrick Levasseur?

  Crazy, crazy.

• 25:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  But it kind of also like. Sends a message of

• 25:37Derrick Levasseur?

  I know.

• 25:37Stephanie Harlowe?

  Hey, this worked.

• 25:38Derrick Levasseur?

  This, this wor- I exa- I, yes. It's bad. It's real bad. And I was just watching a, um-

• 25:44Stephanie Harlowe?

  But it's all bad what the insurance companies do.

• 25:46Derrick Levasseur?

  I know.

• 25:46Stephanie Harlowe?

  So it's like, who do you, who, whose side are we on? I don't even know.

• 25:49Derrick Levasseur?

  I was watching this ju- uh, hearing, uh, judicial hearing or whatever it was, uh, a congress, uh, hearing that they had about Mastercard and Visa and how they take advantage of people. They're like 50% interest rates and shit, like just, just basically robbing people who need help.

• 26:06Stephanie Harlowe?

  That's even a little different though, because people don't necessarily need credit cards.

• 26:09Derrick Levasseur?

  I, I agree, but I'm just saying in general-

• 26:11Stephanie Harlowe?

  You need health insurance, yeah.

• 26:12Derrick Levasseur?

  Where does it stop?

• 26:13Stephanie Harlowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Where does it stop? Does the person who lost their house-

• 26:16Stephanie Harlowe?

  It doesn't, yeah.

• 26:16Derrick Levasseur?

  Because they couldn't pay their bills? Go after the CEO of Mastercard? That's the point I'm trying to make. You can't, there's, there's no gray area. You can't go after, Brian Thompson may have been a bad guy, may have been a good guy, we don't know, but I can promise you, he wasn't the guy processing the individual claim for Luigi's family. So to go after him-

• 26:36Stephanie Harlowe?

  But he's the one that put in this AI thing that just automatically denies claims for like zero reason.

• 26:43Derrick Levasseur?

  So do we take out the AI designers and all them too? Do we kill everybody? You know, that's my point. You can't, you can't go there. I feel bad for Brian's family, that he didn't deserve that. I, he didn't. I don't care if people agree with it or not.

• 26:56Stephanie Harlowe?

  Well, his family certainly doesn't deserve it.

• 26:58Derrick Levasseur?

  I do agree that there has to be a change in the system and we can't take it back now. It happened. And I only hope that the silver lining in here is that it does create a sense of urgency and a new awareness to how corrupt the insurance companies are. And maybe because of this tragedy, there is change.

• 27:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  I mean, that's what you can hope for now, that it, this loss of life will cause a positive change for millions of Americans.

• 27:25Derrick Levasseur?

  Yes. That's the hope. And, and I didn't want it to come this way, but, uh, maybe with this, congress and everybody else now will get off their hands and knees for these insurance companies, because they have the lobbyists out there and they're funding their campaigns. And so whenever you try to go through the legal process, it always goes away because- Politicians on both sides of the aisle are being paid to just shut up and look the other way.

• 27:51Stephanie Harlowe?

  Oh, of course, yeah.

• 27:52Derrick Levasseur?

  Period. So that's really all we have, right? But we'll see what happens with this one. Again, the identification just happened hours of go hours ago before we started recording. So we'll see how this all plays out. I'm going to be very interested in seeing how the the public reacts to Luigi. I have a feeling it's going to be very positive. That's just my opinion. I think there's going to be a lot of TikToks and social media surrounding him and a lot of people putting him on a pedestal.

• 28:21Stephanie Harlowe?

  Uh, what they they already are.

• 28:22Derrick Levasseur?

  Okay.

• 28:23Stephanie Harlowe?

  There's gonna be, there's gonna be T-shirts with his face all over them. I get it. What would be a tragedy is if everything goes back to normal in a few weeks and the health insurance companies continue on as they are. And then this just reaches, uh, you know, a, a point where the public, which I don't get why the government, by the way, the government and these private companies that screw you over, why they're not more afraid? Because we've got kind of like, you know, a strength of in numbers kind of thing. And although our country is incredibly divided right now, things like this will bring them together. And that's when these politicians and these big businessmen that take advantage of you, that's when they really need to be afraid.

• 29:04Derrick Levasseur?

  There is this kind of unifying factor behind this, isn't there, where they're not condoning or congratulating Luigi on the killing?

• 29:09Stephanie Harlowe?

  Both sides of the aisle are kind of like, huh, I sort of see why this happened.

• 29:13Derrick Levasseur?

  Surprise this didn't happen sooner.

• 29:14Stephanie Harlowe?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Derrick Levasseur?

  You know, and we just with in in our country, whether you agree with a lot, a lot of people have access to guns and it doesn't take, it can, one person can, can, can have this type of effect on an entire population. So we'll see how it plays out. It's going to be long-term effects. I do think there will be changes. I think this is a wake-up call.

• 29:32Stephanie Harlowe?

  There needs to be changes.

• 29:33Derrick Levasseur?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Stephanie Harlowe?

  Because the fact of the matter is, these companies, along with the government and with help from the government, have created a, a place where making and keeping people sick puts money in their pockets and making that and and making health, which is such a blessing, such a blessing, like you have the biggest advantage over money over anything if you have your health, making something like health, a capitalistic way to just get billions of dollars while people die and suffer, that that was never a good structure for business. So hopefully they will change that. They're going to lose money, but. And maybe they don't care. Maybe they just want to keep making money and nothing will

• 30:18Stephanie Harlowe?

  change. And then where are we going to go from there? I don't know. But I don't think that people are going to sit quietly anymore.

• 30:24Derrick Levasseur?

  No, it doesn't appear that way. So we'll see what happens here. We'll be following it. Our thoughts are with Brian's family and obviously Luigi's family as well because now they're going to be affected by this. And Luigi, if he is responsible for this and based on what we know and how much evidence they have, he may, he more than likely is going to spend the rest of his life in a prison. But I don't think he's opposed to that. I think we're going to find out based on the manifesto and the way he left little breadcrumbs behind it. He didn't do a great job of kind of covering up his identity. I think we're going to find out that he had made a decision prior to the shooting that he was okay with that.

• 31:00Stephanie Harlowe?

  If I get caught, they're going to know why I did this.

• 31:03Derrick Levasseur?

  They're going to know why I did it and I'm going to represent something in this life.

• 31:05Stephanie Harlowe?

  I'm going to try not to get caught.

• 31:06Derrick Levasseur?

  I'm going to try not to, but if I do, it's going to represent something bigger than myself and it's for people that I don't even know. So we'll see how it plays out. That's going to do it for us, guys. We're going to be back later this week with Karen Reed, part four. It's a long one, so get ready for it. Until then, everyone stay safe out there and we'll see you soon.

• 31:25Stephanie Harlowe?

  Bye.