The 911 call almost didn’t happen.
A McDonald’s manager in Altoona, Pennsylvania, was so skeptical that the UnitedHealthcare CEO murder suspect was sitting in the back of her restaurant that she almost didn’t make the call that put Luigi Mangione in jail, it was revealed in a state court hearing in Manhattan on Monday.
After all, the man sitting near the restrooms had his face covered by a mask and a hat, the unnamed manager told the 911 operator, according to audio of the fateful call, played in public for the first time.
“I have a customer here that, some other customers were suspicious of — that he looked like the CEO shooter from New York?” she told the dispatcher at the beginning of the call, laughing with apparent embarrassment.
“I’m like, I don’t know what to do here, guys,” she told the dispatcher, describing what she told the customers.
“I tried to call the non-emergency number, but it just kept ringing,” the manager also told the dispatcher, her voice apologetic.
Even the dispatch records, shown in court on Monday, had little faith in the call: “Priority: Low,” was the initial entry.
Mangione appeared in court wearing a gray suit, red and white checked dress shirt, and brown dress shoes with black dress socks. He is in court for the first day of what is shaping up to be a week of evidence suppression hearings.
The brief 911 call ended a massive, nationwide, five-day manhunt for the killer of UHC CEO Brian Thompson. It is remarkable for the matter-of-fact voices of both the caller and dispatcher, and for the occasional misunderstanding and interruption.
“This is the one they think shot the police officer?” the dispatcher asks, interrupting the manager’s description of the man in the black jacket and blue medical mask sitting in the back of the restaurant.
“No,” the manager clarifies. “The CEO.”
At one point, the 911 call is interrupted — on which end was not clear — by a woman’s voice shouting about a breakfast order.
“We need more bagels!” the voice yells. “One of them no butter!”
Defense lawyers had asked for the hearings in order to challenge the methods used by the Altoona police to seize evidence and statements when they arrested Mangione at the McDonald’s in December.
Also played in court Monday was restaurant surveillance footage showing Mangione, 28, being questioned and searched for 30 minutes before he was taken into custody as the suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Monday’s testimony also included a namedrop of financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in a federal jail in Manhattan while awaiting trial on a sex trafficking indictment.
“I was told that SCI Huntington did not want an Epstein-style situation,” a correction officer at that Pennsylvania facility testified, explaining why Mangione was kept in a 24-hour observation unit after his arrest, before being transferred to New York City.
Mangione’s black backpack is a primary focus of the hearing.
The defense has asked the judge to find that police erred in not getting a search warrant before seizing and examining the backpack, which contained a part-metal, part-3D-printed 9 mm Glock handgun.
The defense hopes the judge will bar prosecutors from using its contents — which prosecutors say include the murder weapon and an incriminating “manifesto” — at trial.
The unregistered “ghost gun” was a ballistic match, prosecutors say, to the shell casings left on the sidewalk when the CEO was shot from behind outside a Midtown hotel. Thompson was walking into the hotel just after sunrise on December 4, with plans to address a UHC investor meeting.
New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro has not said when he will decide if any evidence must be barred from an eventual trial. No trial date has been set in either Mangione’s federal or state murder prosecution.
This story has been updated with additional detail from the day’s testimony.
