‘Deeply Emotional’: Luigi Mangione’s Friends React to His Guilty Plea

On Friday, Luigi Mangione confessed to stalking and killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street in Dec. 2024. Since the shooting, Mangione has become a nationally recognized figure, and for some he is a symbol of violent retaliation against a broken healthcare system. Throughout the swirl of attention on him, though, his friends and family have remained largely silent.

While in Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Brooklyn known for housing inmates such as Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried, Mangione has stayed in touch with some friends. Mangione didn’t have any friends or family in federal court Friday, but friends who spoke with Rolling Stone say they were unaware he was planning to submit a guilty plea. His federal trial was set to begin in Jan. 2027, and the state trial was scheduled for next month.

“Friday was deeply emotional,” says R.J. Martin, Mangione’s friend and former landlord in Hawaii, where Mangione lived after college. “Beyond the noise, Luigi is a human being with a circle of longtime friends who know who he is, stay in touch, and care about him deeply.”

Martin believes, “Luigi was declared guilty by our government from the start,” and he adds that would make “a truly fair trial difficult to imagine.”

Other friends of Mangione’s say they were surprised to hear he was pleading guilty as opposed to seeing how at least one of his upcoming trials would play out with a jury. Many expressed their sadness at knowing their friend would likely spend much of his life incarcerated, but declined to comment on the record.

A former friend of Mangione’s who did extracurricular computer programming with Mangione in high school says he found it “really weird” to hear the guilty plea, calling it a “stark shift” from the Mangione he used to know.

“He never struck me as a political person,” says R.K., who asked to use only his initials. “I think it speaks to the radicalization in this country in the current day.” Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

R.K. says he finds the crime “unacceptable and deeply sad” but says he hopes the guilty plea doesn’t stop the conversation about Americans’ frustration with the healthcare system. “I’ve experienced the difference firsthand as a foreigner living in this country,” says R.K.

When Mangione was first arrested as the shooting suspect in Dec. 2024, the cellphones of his classmates at Gilman, the prestigious high school in Baltimore he attended, started blowing up with students messaging each other. “Did you see the news?” “OMG, Luigi?!” “I can’t believe it.”

“Luigi was in this crew of kids that you knew were going to an Ivy and were going to do groundbreaking science research,” one of his high school classmates told Rolling Stone in 2024, shortly after he was accused of the crime. “But Luigi was the only one [of them] you could shoot the shit with.