CNN
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The regulars were gathering at a McDonald’s just off the interstate in western Pennsylvania at dawn on Monday when, at some point, a fellow customer caught their attention.

“Doesn’t that look like the New York shooter?” One of the regulars, who gave only his first name, Larry, jokingly recalled his friend.

“He probably heard us,” Larry said of the man sitting about 10 feet away in the back, near the restrooms of the fast-food restaurant in Altoona.

Jokes aside, Larry’s friend was right: This man turned out to be the wanted fugitive suspected of quietly brandishing a silenced pistol on a midtown Manhattan street last week and attacking the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in a brazen assassination attempt that gripped the nation.

According to police who arrested him at McDonald’s, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was sitting alone at a table with a laptop and a backpack. He was wearing a medical mask, a brown cap and a dark jacket. An image shared on social media by Pennsylvania State Police showed Mangione with his blue mask dangling from his ear and eating what looked like a hash brown.

The scion of a wealthy Baltimore family, high school valedictorian and Ivy League graduate, was in Pennsylvania for several days, police said, after he allegedly hit the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, shot and killed.

In the end, New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said, a “combination of old-school detective work and modern technology” led to the arrest of a suspect. The deadly shooting outside an investor conference sparked a massive search, with New York police scouring the city for evidence and combing through thousands of hours of video footage.

Various images – from his stay at a Starbucks in Manhattan before the shooting to a security camera shot of him with his face uncovered and a wide smile beneath his distinctive dark eyes and eyebrows at an Upper West Side hostel where he was staying – were revealed spread across the internet nationwide Five days since the shooting.

“There are numerous pivotal points in this case and the fact that we recovered a tremendous amount of forensic evidence and a tremendous amount of video,” NYPD Chief Detective Joseph Kenny told reporters. “I really couldn’t attribute it to one thing, but if I had to, it would be the release of this photo” of the suspect’s exposed face.

Suspect “went quiet and started shaking”

At the McDonald’s on East Plank Road off Interstate 99, a customer alerted an employee, who called police Monday morning to say the suspect was there.

Around 9:15 a.m., two officers found the man “wearing a medical mask and cap” “sitting at a table in the back of the building” looking at a laptop, a criminal complaint says. There was a backpack on the floor next to the table. They asked him to pull down his mask.

Altoona Police Officer Tyler Frye and his partner “immediately recognized him,” the complaint states.

“We didn’t even think twice about it,” Frye, who has been in office for about six months, told reporters after the arrest. “We knew that was our guy.”

The officers asked the man for identification. He gave them a New Jersey ID card with the name Mark Rosario on it, the complaint says.

When they asked if he had been in New York City recently, he “went quiet and started shaking,” the complaint says.

Police checked and found no records that matched the ID. When they told the man that he was under police investigation, he told the officers his real name: Luigi Mangione. When asked why he used a fake name, the suspect replied, “I clearly shouldn’t have done that,” the complaint states.

In his backpack, police found “a black 3D printed pistol” with a loaded Glock magazine and a “black silencer” that was also 3D printed, the criminal complaint states. Tisch told reporters that Mangione was found with a gun and a silencer “both consistent with the weapon used in the murder,” referring to a device that muffles the sound of a firearm.

The “fraudulent New Jersey ID,” Tisch said, matched “the ID our suspect used to check into his New York hostel before the shooting.” She said he also carried “a handwritten document that reflects both his motivation and his attitude”.

The document, dubbed the suspect’s “manifesto,” contained no specific threats but suggested “ill will toward corporate America,” Kenny told reporters.

“These parasites had it coming,” reads one line in the document, according to a police officer who saw it.

“I apologize for the argument and trauma, but it had to be done,” reads another line. According to Kenny, the document indicated that the suspect acted alone and was self-funded.

According to a law enforcement source who read the document, the suspect also appeared to refer to UnitedHealthcare in the document, describing “United” as one of the largest companies in the United States by market capitalization. Thompson was not specifically mentioned.

According to an NYPD intelligence report obtained by CNN, Mangione appeared to be driven by anger against the health insurance industry and “corporate greed” as a whole.

“He appeared to view the targeted killing of the company’s highest-ranking official as a symbolic exchange and a direct challenge to alleged corruption and ‘power plays,’ claiming in his note that he was the first to approach it with such brutal honesty. ‘,” says the assessment, which is based on the suspect’s three-page handwritten manifesto and Mangione’s social media posts.

According to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, the suspect traveled between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia after the shooting, making stops before being arrested on Monday.

New York prosecutors have charged Mangione with murder, two counts of second-degree weapons possession, one count of second-degree possession of a forged document and one count of third-degree possession of a firearm.

Mangione made his first court appearance in Pennsylvania on Monday. As a judge read him the entire criminal complaint, Mangione verbally pushed back against prosecutors’ contention that the $8,000 cash found on him meant he was trying to evade authorities. He said he didn’t know where the money came from and suspected it might have been planted.

A day later, as police escorted him from their vehicle to the Pennsylvania courthouse for an extradition hearing on Tuesday, Mangione could be heard shouting in part: “This is completely unrealistic and an insult to the intelligence of the American people.” It is a lived experience !”

His lawyer, Thomas Dickey, said his client would fight his extradition. Mangione was handcuffed and shackled and wore an orange jumpsuit with “DOC” written on the back. After being denied bail, he was escorted out of court by officers.