A high school friend of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man charged in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, said he didn’t recognize him in pictures law enforcement circulated because his unmistakable hair was obscured and there are lots of “Italians in New York.” During a Tuesday appearance on Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy asked Fred Leatherbury, “In the last week, when that image of him pulling down the mask—and also with the eyebrows in the car and stuff like that—did you for a moment think to yourself‚ ‘That looks like Luigi’?” Leatherbury, who attended Baltimore’s Gilman School at the same time as Mangione, said it never occurred to him. “When something so large profile happens nationally, I automatically disregard that it could be anybody I know, just out of instinct,” he said. “And the thing that I remember about Luigi—if anything—is his really distinct, curly hair. And in all the security camera footage, all you saw was him with a hat or a hood on, so that wasn’t a connection that I was making. And of course Italians in New York are a dime a dozen—so just the jaw structure alone, the face, that wasn’t a judgment I was rushing to make. I brushed it off, to be honest.” There are over half a million people of Italian background in New York City, according to Census data.
