‘What’s your name?’ Moment police found Mangione eating McDonald’s after shooting

2 hours ago 2

By David Voreacos and Patricia Hurtado

December 10, 2025 — 3.10pm

New York: State prosecutors have released a video excerpt of the first police encounter in December last year with Luigi Mangione, then the main suspect in the New York shooting of a healthcare executive five days earlier.

The video shows Joseph Detwiler, an officer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, questioning Mangione after a McDonald’s restaurant manager had called police to say he resembled the suspect wanted for the killing of UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024.

Police find Luigi Mangione in a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.

Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office have played that excerpt, and dozens of others, over the past week in a pretrial hearing. Mangione’s lawyers have tried to suppress the evidence, arguing that police improperly questioned him before reading him his rights, and then illegally searched his backpack without a warrant.

Mangione, 27, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal murder charges. The pretrial hearing, which resumes for a sixth day on Thursday, applies only to the state case. His lawyers are making a similar push to exclude the evidence from his federal case, in which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

In the backpack seized at the McDonald’s, authorities say they found the gun used to shoot Thompson, a silencer, a gun magazine, a passport and a notebook with writings they say show that Mangione planned the killing.

The writings also shed new light on the steps Mangione may have taken – or planned to take – to avoid capture after Thompson’s killing last year, and underscore that Mangione’s stop in Altoona, a city of about 44,000 people about 370 kilometres west of Manhattan, was meant to be only temporary.

“Keep momentum, FBI slower overnight,” said one note. “Change hat, shoes, pluck eyebrows,” said another.

Thompson, 50, was killed as he walked to a Manhattan hotel for his company’s investor conference. Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting him from behind and then fleeing. Over the next hours and days, police released photos of a suspect, first showing him in a mask and hooded coat and then his face and thick eyebrows.

According to prosecutors, Mangione fled to Newark, New Jersey, immediately after the shooting and took a train to Philadelphia. Among the evidence shown at the pretrial hearing was a Philadelphia transit pass purchased at 1.06pm – little more than six hours after the shooting – and a ticket for a Greyhound bus, booked under the name Sam Dawson, leaving Philadelphia at 6.30pm and arriving in Pittsburgh at 11.55pm.

Police in Altoona responded to the McDonald’s call on December 9 last year after a manager called 911 to relay concerns from customers who thought that Mangione, eating breakfast in a back corner, resembled the man wanted for killing Thompson.

On the call, played in court, the manager could be heard saying that, because Mangione was wearing a medical mask, she could only see his eyebrows and that she searched online for a photo of the suspect for comparison.

Police officers who gave evidence at the hearing this week say it had been raining that day and the bag they found on Mangione, and items inside it, were wet. They were heard on the body-worn camera footage played in court theorising that Mangione had got soaked walking from the city’s bus station.

Taken from a body camera worn by another officer, the video excerpt, which goes for two minutes and 14 seconds, shows Detwiler walking up to Mangione as he sat in the rear of the McDonald’s, wearing a blue mask, a tan cap and a black jacket.

“Do you mind lowering your mask?” Detwiler said to Mangione. “What’s your name?”

Luigi Mangione eats breakfast in the bodycam footage.

Police ask Luigi Mangione to lower his mask.

Mangione said his name was “Mark Rosario”, and Detwiler asked him for identification. He handed the officer a fake New Jersey driver’s licence, which is visible in the video.

Mangione was charged in Pennsylvania with forgery, giving a false ID to police and possessing a gun without a licence. State and federal prosecutors in New York later charged him with murder. He pleaded not guilty.

Mangione’s lawyers had said that releasing the video would prejudice Mangione’s right to a fair trial. Judge Gregory Carro ruled last week that he would seal the videos until the trial started, when the media could apply for their release. A coalition of media outlets, including Bloomberg News, moved last week to secure the release of the videos.

In response to a request for comment on the release of the footage, Mangione’s lawyers referred to a letter they sent to the judge earlier on Tuesday.

“Providing the body-worn camera footage to the media to be repeatedly played before Mr Mangione’s state and federal trials creates a substantial probability that Mr Mangione’s right to a fair trial will be prejudiced by potential jurors seeing this footage in the media,” the lawyers wrote.