On the first day of Christmas — also known as December 25 — partridge is not on the menu for Luigi Mangione. But another exotic bird is.
It’s “baked Cornish hen,” described as the best meal of the year if you’re in the federal prison system.
It’s the holiday lunch special at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Mangione is being held without bail for a second Christmas as he fights state and federal murder charges in the Manhattan ambush shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
“It looks, honestly, like you see it in pictures,” former MDC detainee Brad Rouse told Business Insider of the annual avian treat.
“They did put an effort in,” said Rouse, who still remembers the detention center’s once-a-year Cornish game hen almost two decades later. “It’s a well-cooked, delicious little item.”
The bird will be served with cranberry sauce and sides of spinach or mac and cheese, according to a menu provided to Business Insider by jail officials.
This being a federal lockup, there will be little else that is festive about the meal.
As on any other day, the food will roll in from the kitchen without fanfare, transported inside a locked metal cart on wheels.
“The corrections officer watches it go down the hall and has the key to open it,” Rouse remembered.
The meal will be served on the same plastic trays as every other meal — dished out to a line of detainees by other detainees wearing masks and food-service hats “like cafeteria ladies,” he joked.
There are no holiday place settings, and no forks or knives.
The small birds must be eaten the same way as all meals, by hand and with the help of a plastic spork — a combination spoon and fork designed to minimize the risk of detainees stabbing each other.
“I was surprised. I’d never had a Cornish hen before,” Rouse told Business Insider.
“The effort they put into the meal was very touching,” he added.
“It’s dire and very tough to be in jail at Christmas,” remembered Rouse, a Harvard graduate who was held at Brooklyn’s MDC for a year on drug charges until his release in 2008.
“It’s a time of high emotion. There are a lot of younger men with small children,” said Rouse, who since 2018 has been a consultant with White Collar Advice. The firm helps detainees, inmates, and their families navigate the prison system.
“It can be a very melancholy day,” he said.
Shannon Stapleton / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
The Thompson family’s need for closure
Carols will not be playing over the detention center’s sound system during the Christmas meal, but that may come as a welcome break for Mangione, who was forced to listen to hours of holiday Muzak during a series of evidence-suppression hearings that concluded this week.
The same half-dozen songs, including “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Winter Wonderland,” were blasted repeatedly inside the Manhattan courtroom — the soundtrack for police bodycam footage from Mangione’s arrest at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on December 9, 2024.
UnitedHealthcare
Thompson, 50, was shot from behind on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk just before dawn on December 4, 2024, as he walked to the entrance of a Hilton hotel where he was set to give a speech at UnitedHealthcare’s annual investor conference.
The Minnesota man is survived by his two sons and by his wife, who, in the days after Thompson’s shooting, called him “an incredibly loving father.” Family members have not spoken publicly of the shooting since then.
On Thursday, the last day of the evidence suppression hearing, Mangione’s New York prosecutor, Joel Seidemann, alluded to the family’s continuing pain and need for closure. He asked a judge to set a trial date at Mangione’s next scheduled court appearance on May 18.
“I just hope that the parties understand that it is very important to the family of the victim,” he said, adding that the mother, who is 77 years old, should know “whether or not this is the person who shot her son,” he said.
New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro said he expects to decide by May 18 on lead defense lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo’s bid to suppress statements and evidence taken during the arrest.
