Summary
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in a targeted attack outside a New York Hilton hotel, with investigators describing the killing as meticulously planned.
The gunman fled on foot, then by rental bike, and possibly left the city via bus. Shell casings at the scene had words like “deny” and “defend” inscribed, hinting at a motive linked to Thompson’s work.
Experts suggest the shooter may have military or weapons experience but left key clues, including surveillance footage and discarded items.
Police are analyzing evidence, including DNA, to identify the suspect.
I wish people would stop posting his photo. This is just helping the police to find him. I’m downvoting all posts with his face.
You’re considering that these photos are his photos, when actually it could easily be an entirely other person or, worse, AI-generated person (sites such as This Person Doesn’t Exist is a clear example of how AIs can generate non-existent faces). IIRC, these photos came from news outlets, so it couldn’t really be trusted as a matter of fact.
Despite that, people here on Lemmy seem to be sharing it just for the lulz of it, because meaningful things need a meaning symbol to symbolize it. And those photos, even when they’re not his, is a well-agreed symbol.
If those photos really helped the authorities somehow, they’d already have a grip on him, but they haven’t. So, hey, relax…
I’m sure that if people stop posting the photo the police are going to forget that they have a photo of his face…
I am going to assume you are high or were under the influence of something when you posted this.
You’re meaning to tell me that you think that somehow just the police having a photo is enough to catch the guy? You don’t think they need the help of other people for tips in finding him? Kindly explain the reward then…
Why make their job any easier than it needs to be?
Explain a $10k reward that is being advertised with the picture that you’re trying to say shouldn’t be posted? Stop being ridiculous. Are you being serious? You’re just trolling right?
Ok. Anyways what do you think of the upcoming football match?
Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Sometimes when my iron gets low I want to take bites out of mud.
Grass tastes bad
No jumping in the sewer!!!
What was Wenger thinking sending Walcott on that early?
Just go through the list of people with a motive to kill this guy. Should be easy!
“We are not incredibly incompetent. The shooter was very smart” - overfunded police ranking as a top military force
They’re just anxious to get back to the real problem, domesticated squirrels.
Well, I’ll be damned! The republicans were right!
All it takes is a good-guy with a gun!
It takes a bit more than that to get away with it though. The police even seem impressed.
If failing to close a murder file impressed the police they’d be in a constant state of amazement. About half of homicides are solved and I’m sure premeditated murder outside of family is much much lower than that. 5 to 10 percent for organized crime/gangs for example.
Yeah, but this is one they want to solve. They don’t care if a random person gets shot in the Bronx.
“Words like ‘deny’ and ‘defend’”
Don’t forget the all important DEPOSE.
i have noticed a lot of mainstream headlines leave out “depose.” which is interesting.
Let’s see here. It’s currently the 7th. I wonder what other things happened in NY that need attention. Everyday is indeed a busy day.
I’ll just leave this here.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/homicide.page
Statistically, there should have been at least one more murder in the city since then. Looking at victim demographics in that chart and it’s pretty obvious why this is getting so much attention…it’s very uncommon for a white, non-hispanic person to get murdered in the city.
Anyone watch Saw VI recently? Just curious.
I wonder if he is terminal and pulled the trigger on some recompense for his denial of treatment.
Nope; how many of those god damn movies do they need to make? How does Jigsaw keep coming up with new methods of torture?
I don’t know. I stopped watching with The Final Chapter. And then they came back with 3 or 4 more after that.
VI involved health insurance executives who are directly responsible for countless deaths going through the “games”.
Finding new ways to torture other humans is like a specialty of humans my guy
I just watched a compilation of all the deaths a few months back. That’s all you really remember afterwards anyway (first movie excluded, which was actually pretty good)
Further proof that if you’re smart enough you can usually get away with it, and a reminder that cops are only effective because must criminals are fucking stupid.
Well yeah. The real criminal is dead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most murders aren’t premeditated killing of what is basically a stranger.
If you’re not on the scene when the police arrive, not a family member, not somebody with a known grudge and not a rival gang member, don’t brag about the killing to your friends, and don’t visibly flee the scene in your own car, then they’re reduced to the CSI stuff, which I’ll wager is far less effective than it is on the show.
And also don’t give your DNA to 23 and Me.
I’m glad all those true crime podcasts have finally been put to good use!
Just ask his sister Maggie where he bought his bunker with his Donnie Darko money… Nobody? Not one fucking mention he looks exactly like him??
I mean, it certainly was the first thing that popped to mind. But no, I didn’t mention it.
Okay, honestly? Hear me out because as an European one thing stood out to me.
Why didn’t NYPD catch him? Because he fled using… public communication. It’s too out of this world for them to be able to track him down. No protocols. No nothing. Because nobody, ever, uses public communication in USA.
. . . xD
Did he use public transit? I thought the first thing I heard is people thought he used a rental bike but it turned out it wasn’t one of those. But yeah even if he did I think basically what he did was ride from the scene of the crime into Central Park which has less CCTV and is a lot harder to track people in so it probably took longer for the police to find his trail from there.
Ditch the bike in the park, get changed (remove top layer, put in backpack), hop in to the waiting car on the other side of the park. Toss the backpack in a dumpster on your way out of town.
You’re outta there before NYPD even knows it happened.
CBS is saying that they found the backpack buried in some rocks in Central Park.
NYPD officers were in Central Park near West Drive on Friday, searching for anything with ties back to the gunman. Eventually, they discovered a backpack they believe belongs to the suspect, a high-ranking NYPD source told CBS News New York.
Former NYPD detective Felipe Rodriguez says he thinks the suspect pre-planned his hiding spot.
“It seems to have been buried in rocks and everything else. This was something that just wasn’t done in five minutes, and I am pretty sure that he was able to do this even before he committed the homicide,” Rodriguez said. “We actually have to look at the magnitude, and how big Central Park is. It’s really big, 256 acres at this point.”
Saturday, police said the backpack contained a jacket, but not the murder weapon. The recovered items were sent to the crime lab for forensic tests, which could confirm if they are the suspect’s.
Interesting.
I suppose carrying the bag out of CP would be kinda sus
I did hear he actually most likely took a bus out of NYC as they had footage of him entering a bus station but not leaving it. It could be hard to figure out which bus he took although if he had to buy a ticket from a person there it might be easier.
I heard he climbed down into the sewers, put his signature hockey mask back on and is sheltering with some young adult martial arts reptilians.
I heard he turned in to a bird and flew away
I heard all birds now contain a pearl of his consciousness and that he lives on in an endless dream.
There’s a lot of people getting on and off a bus at any given time. They also probably didn’t know he used a bus until later. They probably used CCTV cameras to track where he went, but they’d have to do that individually after they found out what happened. He was probably well out of the city before they knew. There’s really nothing they could do except maybe lock the whole city down while they search, but that’s not going to happen.
What do you mean by public communication?
I think they met either transportation or commuter
Transportation. Thanks…writing half-asleep didn’t work out for me. :/
pretty sure nyc has the highest usage of public transportation of the whole country though
Almost 50% in fact
And that is still pretty low compared globally, which is the posters point
Do you have a source to back that up? In nyc about half of the population doesn’t have a car. That sounds pretty in line with other major cities in the world
America is car centric. I am saying many other countries are way more focused on public transportation.
We are talking specifically about nyc here buddy
Exactly buddy. Globally NYC still aint that big on public transportation
You know the rich are shitting their pants over this. It’s gotta be like a David and Goliath thing for them. It’d be a great time to start a private security company.
As much as I would totally hate to see the average board room turned into a kindergarten classroom: Not gonna happen. Just expect to see more stories about security guards “roughing people up” and more cops told to bring a spare piece and a dime bag to the site of a self defense shooting when one of the roid fiends unloads on someone for looking at them funny.
Elon was building droids to replace workers, but now they are going to have to use them to protect Elon.
Someone will find a way to hack the droid and turn it on the ‘protected’ individual.
Hopefully the hacker waits until the droids develop a good name for themselves and all the CEOs have one. Then flip them all at once iRobot style.
It’s gotta be like a David and Goliath thing for them.
This is the bad timeline though. I’m just waiting to hear that this guy was a pro hired by a C-suite rival. Not some hero of the commons.
Good being done for bad reasons is still good
Good being done for bad reasons is still good
What about bad being done for good reasons? Still bad? (hint: murder)
Cool motive still murder
Idk, the implication it seems your making is that this murder was bad, but I’d argue the result is pretty good here regardless of intentions (though their intentions seem pretty clear given the bullet casings)
No that one’s fine actually
That would be kind of a bummer. Still a gain for society
I doubt it would be a gain if someone, who hired someone to kill this guy, would become the next CEO.
I mean yes, but also these execs are more than rich enough to just have a 24/7 guard detail on retainer. They’ll be mildly inconvenienced by that tho so bets are they’ll step back and put a pazzi as the face of their companies.
It’ll fade. Unless…
It happens every three months or so. With escalating difficulty. All they way to being found dead alone in their office. Then slow down to every 18 to 36 months. That’s when they’d be scared enough to actually change corporate policies.
As someone once said: We only have to get lucky once. You have to be lucky every day of your life.
I think, to enact real systemic change, we would need at least one big heroic deed.
Many small murders of billionaires is great… but something like a bomb in the boardroom, take out a whole C-suite with one blast, that would send the appropriate message to these social murderers.
Either way, we desperately need more heroes.
After writing my comment, I thought of mass shooters tweaking their tactic, and going to different kinds of locations. Like certain board rooms.
It’s going to be harder after Wednesday. I’m certain Sodexo, ABM, Cintas, etc are going to scrutinize all their support staff now.
I don’t want to be a downer, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed has a long history of doing that and so far it kind of culminated in world war 1.
Certainly the assassination of Ferdinand is a proximate cause of WWI, but there were much greater forces in play. The great powers had giant mechanized armies for the first time, they had plans for the deployment of millions on very strict deadlines, and they had the belief that failure to meet those deadlines would mean national destruction.
I think it is more plausible to argue that propaganda of the deed helped to end the gilded age and usher in the New Deal era, which was America’s golden era.
I also act under political desperation. Only under the most optimistic assumptions will electoralism be able to save us from climate change; currently the most likely outcome is human extinction. If the propaganda of the deed has only a 5% chance of saving us from our modern gilded age and the resultant climate-induced end of civilization, then I say it is a chance we must take for we are running out of serious options.
but something like a bomb in the boardroom,
…also risks killing innocent people in adjacent parts of the building.
The janitor and the guys fixing the elevator don’t need to become collateral damage.
Politicians in particular should be rethinking about how much they really want to be complete shitheads in public. Perhaps turn down the glee when they enact harmful legislation as well.
I’m sure Academie (or whatever they’re calling Blackwater) these days and the Pinkertons are about to see a lot of new business.
Every time I am reminded that the Pinkertons still exist, I go replay a couple parts of Red Dead Redemption 2…
If he planned this much and they don’t know his names homie is long gone by now
Those discarded items might not even have his DNA on them. Everyone knows about DNA evidence nowadays, if he’s really on the ball it’d be easy enough to pick up some random decoys.
Doesn’t it also require the DNA to be stored on file to be matched? They haven’t even got a suspect to get DNA from.
No, they could pinpoint you just by dna of relatives. Hence why the whole 23andme is such a terrible idea.
If those were his items, and his dna on those items, sure. Iirc, this is how they got the BTK killer- a familial match.
Not BTK, Golden State Killer.
They can’t pinpoint you. DNA is about as terrible as fingerprints and lie detectors. They’re all full of false positives.
Sure its not perfect but if they can narrow it down from a few million people to just a few 100/1000’s that makes fibding someone much easier .
Nah, this tech isn’t useful to prove you’re a suspect. Its only use is to prove that someone is not a suspect
They got his face on camera… maybe. Assuming it’s the same smiling guy and with a partial DNA match, I’d think that’s enough to get a court order to get a blood sample to get a better DNA match.
Of course that’s assuming the smiling guy is the same guy AND one of his relatives did 23andme AND they can find and arrest him.
It’d be the cherry on top if he left evidence that linked other health insurance CEOs.
