It was a big Monday for the news: The same day a jury decided that Daniel Penny would go unpunished in the killing of an unhoused, mentally ill man named Jordan Neely, the New York Police Department (NYPD) took into custody a 26-year-old suspect, Luigi Mangione, in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
What wasn’t on the news was an identification of the killer of 17-year-old Yeremi Colino, who was stabbed to death the day after Thompson was shot. Initial reporting found Colino and another teen were stabbed after saying that neither of them spoke English; police now claim the killing was “gang-related.” Unlike the killings of Thompson or Neely, though, Colino’s death has yet to be made into a “culture war” story.
According to reporting by Mediate, as of Monday, the New York Times had run zero stories on Colino, in contrast with the dozens of stories it had run related to the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting. Colino’s killers are, almost a week later, still at large after stabbing someone on the street. If NYPD officers were busy finding Thompson’s killer, they weren’t doing a very good job of it, as the suspect was ultimately apprehended in Pennsylvania.
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Let's break it down: The life of a health insurance CEO who raked in $10 million last year is worth a media brouhaha and consuming the focus of a police force bigger and more well-funded than a large majority of the world's militaries. But the lives of Colino and Neely were up for grabs; the penalty for killing them is apparently walking free (at least for now, with Colino’s killers still wanted).
The New York Post took it a step further with its Tuesday cover, saying Penny had “protected subway riders” while teasing the “chilling manifesto” of the “health insurance boss ‘killer’” under a cropped version of Mangione’s Twitter/X profile picture.
Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker pointed out that Mangione and Penny, who was acquitted of manslaughter for choking Neely to death in 2023, are both 26-year-old men. Just last month, everyone was totally up in arms about the threat of radicalized young men, arguing that Donald Trump and the right had entirely captured the disillusioned group, as well as those who consider themselves anti-establishment. (If Mangione is indeed Thompson’s killer, his politics, based on his alleged online posts, can only be categorized as broadly anti-establishment rather than left- or right-wing, roving from podcasters like Joe Rogan to his own bizarre ramblings.)
Writer Luke O’Neil aptly described the portrait of Mangione that the internet has pieced together as among “the type of wayward young men who have been drifting further right in recent years that we were all psychoanalyzing in the media after the election.” O’Neil, seemingly like Mangione, suffers debilitating chronic back pain that he’s unable to get covered by insurance. (Given Mangione’s significant family wealth, it’s unclear if his resentment comes from an insurance denial expense.)
In a note on Bluesky, O’Neil observed how back injuries in particular “sort of [f*ck] with men in terms of masculinity,” affecting how they participate in an archetypal kind of manliness, one based on physical strength. According to the New York Times, Mangione had told a friend he was living with in 2023 that “dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible.”
The possibility that Mangione’s physical pain under our dehumanizing health care system may have driven him away from intimate relationships could be further evidence that trying to cater to a bygone conception of masculinity continuously harms men. But toxic masculinity is just one of the many norms failing us.
In the weeks after Neely died, I connected his killing to the “crime wave” propaganda that swept American cities after the mass protests of 2020, used to justify boosting police budgets (while decrying the “defund the police” talking point). These narratives distract from the reality of reduced social services for populations like the unhoused and mentally ill. At the time I feared Neely’s killing was a signal of how deeply the resentment against leftist and progressive campaigns was felt by those in power who feel threatened by them.
In the year and a half since — in the wake of Penny’s acquittal and the killing of Colino — the power of that resentment seems to have gathered force. In that time, the United States has openly funded warfare killing scores of thousands, as pointed out by Thakker and The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi. Meanwhile, last week, Mayor Eric Adams seemed to praise Penny’s actions as “doing what we should have done as a city.”
Without legitimizing the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer’s actions or endorsing violence, it needs to be acknowledged that, as Thakker wrote, “A gun killed Thompson. Paperwork has killed thousands.” According to reporting in The Guardian, UnitedHealthcare denied roughly one in every three claims it received in 2023, while making significant profits.
The internet is demanding acknowledgment that the American health care system kills people by proxy every day, but health insurance companies are now reportedly looking at private security to protect their executives, as noted by Mahdawi. Like Penny, private security staffers have killed people with little legal consequence, such as in the case of 24-year-old San Francisco resident Banko Brown, shot to death days before Neely was killed. I am reminded of a quote from abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Where life is precious, life is precious.”
