Luigi Mangione spent the one-year anniversary of the shooting of Brian Thompson in a Manhattan courtroom, watching video of his arrest in the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s murder — including his disrobing for an “in-depth” strip search.
“We don’t do in-depth searches very often, no,” Altoona Pennsylvania Patrolman Tyler Frye testified during a third day of state-level evidence-suppression hearings. He also said he’d never before seen a strip search used for an arrest relating to forgery — Mangione’s initial charge, for what police alleged was a false ID.
Before Mangione was strip-searched, however, a small knife had been recovered from his pocket, according to police bodycam footage aired on the courtroom’s five overhead screens.
Moments later in the footage, an officer searching through Mangione’s backpack could be heard saying, “There’s a gun.” A weapons possession charge would be added to his arrest complaint.
Mangione’s strip search followed five minutes after the gun was found. When asked to describe the rarely conducted search, Frye only said, “He’s naked, and they do a more thorough search.”
The search was not recorded on police body cameras, as per protocol, Frye said in court.
Before the cameras were turned off, however, they recorded Mangione disrobing, a lengthy process given that he was arrested wearing multiple layers of clothing, including two heavy winter jackets, two pairs of jeans, and a pair of what police in the footage called “long johns.”
Large blurry rectangles popped up at times to obscure Mangione’s torso, hips, and legs as he removed the multiple layers of clothing, including two pairs of jeans and a pair of long underwear. Prior to being arrested, Mangioni tried to throw police off his scent by claiming to be a homeless man named Mark, earlier testimony revealed.
As Mangione removed his clothing, an intake officer asked a series of questions.
“What’s your date of birth, Luigi?” the officer asks, recording the answer — May 6, 1998.
“Are you right or left-handed?”
“Right,” Mangione answers.
“What are the color of your eyes?”
“Brown.”
When the officer asks, “Single?” Mangione answered, “Yeah.”
Thompson was fatally shot from behind on a Midtown sidewalk shortly after dawn on December 5, 2024, as the 50-year-old father of two was about to attend an annual investor conference. The assassination-style shooting sparked a nationwide manhunt that captivated the nation.
Federal and state prosecutors say that the 9 mm ghost gun Mangione had in his backpack when he was arrested five days later in the small Pennsylvania town matches the shell casings and single spent bullet recovered from the sidewalk.
In hearings set for this week and next, defense lawyers are challenging how Altoona police gathered evidence from Mangione. The lawyers have asked New York State Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro to bar prosecutors from showing the disputed evidence to a jury in the yet-to-be-scheduled 2026 trial.
Throughout the day on Thursday, Frye sat in the courtroom’s witness chair, providing a narration as police bodycam footage showed multiple angles of Mangione’s arrest and post-arrest processing.
Frye, 26, told the judge, the prosecutor, and the crowded courtroom that he was still a probationary officer on the morning of December 9, 2024, when the call came in that a “suspicious male” at the Altoona McDonald’s looked like “the New York City shooter.”
The five-day, nationwide manhunt sparked by Thompson’s shooting ended when Mangione lowered his face mask for the two cops as they surrounded his seat near the restrooms in the back of the restaurant.
“I knew it was him immediately,” Frye’s partner, Patrolman Joseph Detwiler, told the judge in testimony Tuesday.
Some of the footage screened in court showed police officers rummaging through Mangione’s backpack at the McDonald’s and later at the police station. Defense attorneys say that the police failed to get the requisite search warrant, and that the contents — including the gun — must be suppressed. Prosecutors counter that Pennsylvania law allows law enforcement to search a suspect and their belongings as part of an arrest.
New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro has not said when he will make a decision on what evidence can be shown to a jury. No trial date has been set in either Mangione’s federal or state murder cases.
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