Here is a thread in the Politics Forum to talk about the issues that the above linked opinion page brings up:
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At this point life is imitating art.
Haven’t seen this detail posted here yet. As of April 2024 he was still doing “normal” 26 year old guy things, like backpacking in Thailand…
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This very much looks like a classic case of the first presentation of a major mental illness. The parents, the suspect, friends, etc. have no clue what is going on, or the severity of the issue until it is too late. Just that something is off.
If the parents had identified their son to the police, I wonder if it would have made any difference. They had no communication with him, he was using fake ID’s, etc. I suppose they could trace financial transactions if they knew the name he was using.
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Yea it seemed like something happened or snapped soon after that or at least it coincides with him being out of touch with family and friends.
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I think the only path that his attorneys will take is the mental health break. I don’t see any other path forward. He will have good representation so I’m sure they will try everything they can.
But if it is, in fact, a psychotic episode, schizophrenia, or another serious mental illness, they should lead with that.
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Seems to me there are several issues with the “he just snapped” argument.
There is no question based on the evidence unearthed so far that this was premeditated, planned, required a high degree of executive functioning to pull off. This is not some psychotic break where he lunged at a stranger because the voices in his head told him the stranger was the devil. The actual weapon- required planning, technical and fine motor skills to assemble. Etc.
The facts just don’t seem to fit with previous successful temporary insanity type defenses. He wasn’t being threatened or bullied, and he had enough high level cognitive functioning to be at the right place at the right time.
Going to be a high hurdle…
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I disagree. He reminds me a lot of Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, who was extremely intelligent and extremely high functioning as a young man. His descent into mental illness and subsequent violence took longer, but to me there are parallels.
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Everything I know about court trials comes from Law and Order SVU which of course means I know nothing about actual court trials, but TV has told me that the threshhold for an insanity defense is wether the accused was, in the moment of the crime, able to distinguish right from wrong and whether they were able to understand that what they were doing was wrong. Could Mangione distinguish right from wrong at the moment he shot the CEO? Is that what they would potentially need to prove? If so, simply being schizophrenic - and we have no idea if he even is - wouldn’t be enough. Or has TV once again misled me?
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My son suffered drug induced psychosis, when it first happened it was very scary. He was eventually medicated and in therapy. It took over a year to get him back to somewhat normal. He would sometimes appear normal before that (but never at night). Getting him help was hard, he had one intake at a practice, I was told no way were they accepting him as a patient, but to get rid of guns if we had them, lock up knives. They hinted that I could be in danger, I started locking my bedroom door (once I woke up to him staring at me). I tried to convince him go to the ER, he refused. It was during the early days of COVID, to add to the fun. He was arrogant with delusions of grandeur, very paranoid, very angry/upset, but still smart. I think mental illness is similar to other medical issues, like autism, not always the same. Fortunately we have a pediatric psychiatrist in the family that helped u til we could actually find help. This shooter gives me PTSD,
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Pure speculation here, but my gut feeling is that Mangione went down some rabbit hole online at some point recently (6 months). A deeper, grosser rabbit hole than Reddit. Maybe he found a space where people were writing about their fantasies of murdering CEOs, or maybe they were already conspiring to commit crimes.
Mangione appeared to be on the phone with someone the morning of the murder. So he was in touch with at least one person, and it seems that he cut off his “old life” so this would be a person from his “new life”.
I’m curious if that person was aware of what he was doing (or even an accomplice). That might mitigate any insanity claim, but I’m not a lawyer so not sure on that aspect.
Here’s a legal question for those who know about these things. There are a ton of “alibi” posts on social media right now. For example:
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Clearly they are meant…facetiously - is that the right word? At any rate, not serious. However, since they purport to be alibis, could there be legal repercussions for something like hindering an investigation? Or does the fact that they are meant “humorously” protect them from that?
I had a similar thought. Back pain, can’t go out much, stays at home scrolling the internet…
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With regard to motive, I heard a discussion on NPR yesterday in which it was said that UHC has the highest rate of rejection of claims of any insurance company. I looked it up and verified this to be the case. 1/3 of their claims are rejected.
With regard to another point raised in this discussion, paranoid schizophrenics have a high degree of executive function.
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You’re right, we cannot make assumptions about the parents, as we don’t and may never know all of the details. Yet it is one thing if a person is avoiding their parents, but a completely different issue if a person has dropped off the face of the earth and no one can contact them. I would suspect foul play, an accident, illness or a severe mental disorder. It is fortunate for people who have disappeared on hiking trips or been kidnapped in foreign countries that their families followed up on their fears when something seemed abnormal, whether they were a grown man or not.
I have only regretted the times that I suspected something was going wrong with a person, and didn’t take action to help them, for whatever weak reason. I have never regretted aggressively following up.
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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Medical insurance denials and problems (specific incidents that you encountered or know of)
Do you have a link? Did the article say what proportion of the rejections were correctly denied?
Interestingly, he was not one of the highest paid insurance company CEOs.