Dec. 8 (UPI) — Luigi Mangione was in court again for the fourth day of an evidentiary hearing Monday after missing Friday for an illness.
Mangione, 27, is charged in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, on a sidewalk in Manhattan. He was arrested five days later in an Altoona, Pa., McDonalds.
Mangione and his lawyers are trying to get his first statements, his notebook and a gun found in his backpack excluded from evidence at trial. Police took them before they had a search warrant. On Friday, the hearing was postponed because Mangione was ill.
Officer Christy Wasser of the Altoona Police Department searched Mangione’s backpack in the McDonald’s on the day he was arrested, she testified Monday morning.
When she searched the backpack, she found a pocketknife and a loaf of bread. She said that when Mangione was officially arrested, she “walked over and picked up his backpack.”
She was shown on body camera video pulling “wet, gray underwear” out of the backpack. She said, “And when I opened it up, it was a magazine.” The magazine was fully loaded.
She also said she found a phone in a Faraday bag, which is designed to block an electronic signal used to detect items.
At 10:03 a.m. an officer can be heard on the footage talking about a search warrant, but a different officer said one was not needed at that stage.
She had said he searched the bag to ensure there was no bomb in it.
“[The officer] did not search the bag because she reasonably thought there might be a bomb, but rather this was an excuse designed to cover up an illegal warrantless search of the backpack,” defense attorneys have argued in a court filing. “This made-up bomb claim further shows that even she believed at the time that there were constitutional issues with her search, forcing her to attempt to salvage this debacle by making this spurious claim.”
Earlier Monday, Blair County First Assistant District Attorney Nichole Smith testified about ordering two search warrants and about Mangione’s arrest on forgery charges in Pennsylvania. He initially gave police a fake ID. She said he was arraigned on the day of the arrest.
Mangione’s defense team objected to prosecutors using the terms “execution” and “manifesto” when discussing Thompson’s killing and Mangione’s notebook. Judge Gregory Carro said those terms have no effect during the hearing, but said, “You’re certainly not going to do that at trial.”