Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of brazenly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson turned celebrated vigilante, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday.

The federal charges include stalking, a firearms offense, and murder through use of a firearm, according to NPR. If convicted, the murder charge makes Mangione eligible for the death penalty. Mangione is also facing additional charges from state prosecutors in New York and in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested.

Attorney General Pam Bondi recently directed prosecutors at the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for Mangione. “If there was ever a death case, this is one,” Bondi told Fox News. “This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him.”

In the months since Thompson’s murder in December, Mangione has become a lightning rod of controversy. For many, he represents the resentment and disappointment many Americans harbor about the US health care system. Mangione’s online activity has also become the subject of intense scrutiny, from his banner photos on X to his more than 200 Goodreads reviews.

His review of the so-called “Unabomber Manifesto” has attracted particular attention. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless [to] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” he wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”

Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham who studies ant-tech radicalism, has been trying to better understand that essay’s author, Ted Kaczynski, who he’s currently writing a book about. Although Fleming is cautious about saying Mangione was inspired by Kaczynksi, it’s hard not to notice a few parallels in their cases. “Assassinating corporate executives to create a media spectacle is straight out of the Unabomber’s playbook. The assassin of Brian Thompson also left some engravings on the shell casings, which reminds me of the........

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