Mangione had left a trail on social media before the murder, posting mostly innocuous things about his life as a 20-year-old, but there was at least one clue that pointed to a possible motive: a quote from Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, the terrorist who killed and maimed people he held, had ruined the world with technology: “Our society tends to view as a disease any way of thinking or behaving that is inconvenient to the system This is plausible because when a person does not fit into the system, it causes both pain for the person and problems for the system. Therefore, manipulating an individual to conform to the system is considered a cure for the disease and therefore good.”

By far his greatest interest is the work of Tim Urban, an author and illustrator popular with tech types who publishes science explainers and anti-woke politics articles about how polarization is bad and rationalism can save the world. This is obviously not the profile of a murderer. If anything, they’re closer to the young male swing voter we’ve been hearing so much about lately.

The largest manhunt in recent city history began early Wednesday morning outside the Hilton Hotel in Midtown, where Thompson was staying for a business conference. After he went outside, a masked gunman opened fire at least twice, hitting and killing Thompson. Then, according to police and surveillance video, the gunman crossed the street, rode away on his bicycle, and zigzagged through Midtown, Central Park and finally to a bus station in Upper Manhattan. Within hours, he managed to evade the country’s largest police department, which had access to thousands of cameras, and disappeared.

Authorities soon put together a partial timeline leading up to the crime. ABC News reported that the shooter arrived in the city on November 24 on an interstate bus from Atlanta, Georgia. He then checked into an Upper West Side hostel on November 30 using a fake New Jersey ID and paid in cash, according to CNN. Maskless photos of the shooter were taken here after the gunman reportedly took down his mask while flirting with the hostel receptionist. On December 4, the day of the shooting, the masked man was spotted at a Starbucks a few blocks from the Hilton. Around that time, the shooter threw away a water bottle and a protein bar, which police retrieved and took DNA samples from.

Tisch credited the “world’s greatest detectives” with retracing the killer’s trail and finding partial images of his face taken at a hostel, where he pulled down his mask to flirt with a receptionist and a taxi, which captured the shooter’s eyes from the back seat. The images were immediately published and over 300 miles west, a McDonald’s customer linked them to Mangione. NYPD detectives rushed to Altoona to question Manigone, who is being held on weapons violations.

Mangione grew up in the Baltimore area, where he attended an expensive private high school before attending college at the University of Pennsylvania. He later moved to Hawaii, where he spent part of last year at a co-living and co-working space called Surfbreak HNL in Honolulu.

“Luigi was an incredibly considerate, compassionate person. I have had many long, intense conversations with him, not only about the state of world politics, but also about things we can do to improve society,” says RJ Martin, the owner of Surfbreak HNL. “It’s like complete disbelief that it could have been him, in the sense that when you talk about a good person, someone who can be happy to spend time with someone who is just considerate and has a good heart.” That was definitely Luigi.”