How suspected CEO killer on the run was recognized at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, hash brown in hand, and finally captured

The regulars began assembling in the predawn at the McDonald’s on East Plank Road in Altoona, a Pennsylvania city of about 42,000 just off I-95 in Blair County.

The regulars began assembling in the predawn Monday at a McDonald’s just off the interstate in western Pennsylvania when at some point a fellow customer caught their attention. “Don’t that look like the shooter from New York?” one of the regulars, who only gave his first name, Larry, recalled his friend joking. “He probably heard us,” Larry said of the man seated maybe 10 feet away in the back, near the restrooms of the fast-food restaurant in Altoona. All joking aside, Larry’s friend was correct: That man turned out to be the wanted fugitive suspected of calmly pulling out a pistol with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and gunning down the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in a brazen assassination that gripped the nation. Luigi Mangione, 26, sat alone at a table with a laptop and a backpack, according to police who arrested him at McDonald’s. He was wearing a medical mask, a brown beanie and a dark jacket. An image shared on social media by the Pennsylvania State Police showed Mangione, his blue mask dangling from his ear, eating what appeared to be a hash brown. The scion of a wealthy Baltimore family who was a high school valedictorian and an Ivy League graduate was in Pennsylvania for several days, police said, after allegedly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last Wednesday outside a Manhattan hotel about 230 miles from Altoona.