Luigi Mangione returns to court Friday for the fourth day of an evidence suppression hearing in the state case accusing him of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City sidewalk last year.
Two patrol officers from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who were among more than a dozen officers at the McDonald’s where Mangione was arrested after the shooting, are expected to testify.
One of them, Christy Wasser, appears on body camera footage searching Mangione’s backpack and is later heard saying, “there’s a gun.”
The defense is trying to exclude the contents of the backpack from Mangione’s trial, arguing that police had no warrant or reason to even touch it.
“He never acted belligerently, did he?” defense attorney Jacob Kaplan asked Trooper Tyler Frye during Thursday’s proceeding. “No,” Frye responded.
“You never tried to open your backpack at McDonald’s, did you?” Kaplan asked. “No,” the patrolman responded.
Luigi Mangione appears in Manhattan Supreme Court alongside his attorneys Karen Friedman Agnifilo and Marc Agnifilo during an evidentiary hearing in the murder case of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on December 4, 2025.
Angela Weiss/Pool via Reuters
The bag contained what prosecutors have described as the means and motive for the alleged crime. The prosecutor says police recovered a 3D-printed gun used to kill Thompson and a notebook in which Mangione allegedly wrote: “The goal is insurance. Check all the boxes.”
The hearing is expected to continue well into next week, although the judge on Thursday told both sides they were “doubling down” and said that “doesn’t help their case.”
