How a Freak Accident Turned Luigi Mangione Into a Vengeful Murder Suspect

Luigi Mangione appeared to be living the dream when he moved to Honolulu to spend six months at a $2,000-a-month beach community.

From a prominent Baltimore family, he was the valedictorian of his class at the prestigious Gilman School and passed with flying colors from his graduating class at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania in 2020.

Everything pointed to a promising future in tech when he took time out in Hawaii in 2022 hoping to learn to surf. He was ripped, he’d taught himself code in college and was hoping to become a video game creator.

But his first surfing lesson turned into a nightmare when it triggered Mangione’s spinal problems and left him in bed for a week with his back and hips “locked up.”

The surfing had apparently aggravated a spinal condition called spondylolisthesis that he had suffered from since childhood, leaving him suffering from excruciating pain. Spondylolisthesis is where a bone in the spine slips forward, most commonly in the lower back.

Posts from a Reddit account associated with Mangione suggested that the “intermittent numbness” that he had suffered had become constant after the accident and he was “terrified of the implications.”

R. J. Martin, the founder of Surfbreak, the co-living, co-work space where Mangione was staying, told the New York Times: “His spine was kind of misaligned. He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.”

“It was really traumatic and difficult, you know, when you’re in your early twenties and you can’t, you know, do some basic things,” Martin added in an interview with CNN.

He said Mangione’s back injury was so painful he was unable to have sex, explaining: “He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible. I remember him telling me that and my heart just breaks.”

Martin saw no indication that the friendly, articulate young man was angry or taking heavy medication for the pain while staying at the camp.

Mangione flew back to the East Coast but returned to Honolulu and rented an apartment in the same neighborhood before heading back to the mainland in the summer of 2023 for surgery on his back, surmised Martin.

In July 2023, a Reddit user who matches Mangione’s profile – without listing his name – said he underwent spinal surgery that seemed to have eased the symptoms. The user also discussed suffering from other health issues in the past including Lyme disease and “brain fog.”

“It’s absolutely brutal to have such a life-halting issue,” he writes of the brain fog, which started after his college “Hell Week” initiation. “The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms - they certainly don’t for me,” he added.

After the op, Mangione sent Martin an x-ray photo of his spine. He also posted an x-ray of metal pins fitting into a spine on his X account.

Martin said the spine’s appearance worried him and he texted Mangione to ask how he was doing.

“So, long story,” the reply came back, according to Martin. “Will fill ya in in person. Back in Hawaii as soon as I can, I have to figure out some spine stuff here first.”

The same Reddit user took an even more skeptical view of the medical system in an April 2024 answer to a fellow user who asked how people under 35 were able to get “fusion surgery.”

The user offered three options:

“1) Keep trying different surgeons. ‘nobody will operate on my back until i’m at least 40′ is nonsense coming from a medical professional who lacks perspective. If your back is broken and it’s unlivable, age has nothing to do with it. Good surgeons understand this and will operate on you based on your symptoms + anatomy

“2) Tell them you are ‘unable to work’ / do your job. We live in a capitalist society. I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life.

“3) Plan Z: fake a foot drop or piss yourself. This is nuclear option, but there comes a point where it’s just ridiculous that people won’t operate on your broken spine.”

The user also talked of suffering from problems sleeping and IBS.

Mangione’s email was signed up to Piping Rock, a supplements website, according to a data breach, and he played on chess.com with the username sexytwerker69 in an account connected to his Gmail.

Friends of Mangione have been quoted as saying that the back surgery was the catalyst for his transformation.

“Spoke with a source that had a lot of friends that went to high school with Luigi Mangione,” Jack Mac, of Barstool Sports, posted on X. “What keeps coming up is a back surgery that ‘changed everything’ for him and he went ‘absolutely crazy.’”

Some reports suggest he turned to psychedelics, although there is no direct evidence of that other than a cartoon mushroom on his X profile and that his reading material listed online included a book by Paul Stamets titled, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World.

He also reposted a cartoon on X about “Placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics.” It shows a group of naked characters dancing in a circle with another group sitting demurely on an L-shaped sofa. “So, I’m guessing we’re in the placebo group,” says one.

Mangione also retweeted a video discussing the merits of psychedelics, titled, “What does the research say about the personal & societal risk of particular psychedelics vs. alcohol.”

Other books listed on the Goodreads review site include Back in Control: A Spinal Surgeon’s Roadmap Out of Chronic Pain and Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.

On his X account, Mangione reposted a summary of another book, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.

He lived in Japan for a while, writing on X in April that the nation’s “urban development is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal. The solution to falling birthrates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural.”

At some point this year, Mangione simply dropped out of sight.

“Hey man I need you to call me. I don’t know if you are okay or just in a super isolated place and have no service. But I haven’t heard from you in months,” wrote one friend on X in September.

“You made commitments to me for my wedding and if you can’t honor them I need to know so I can plan accordingly,” they added.

In October, another friend wrote: “Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.”

Whatever exactly happened after the spinal surgery is unclear, but Mangione undoubtedly came out of it a changed man.

The consensus appears to be from friends and family that they would have never guessed that he would turn up again in such violent and tragic circumstances.