Hawaii
Inside Luigi Mangione’s time as a beach bum in Hawaiian paradise — with accused UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin tickling girls, Tinder matching a yoga guru
Life in Hawaii was a beach for Luigi Mangione, before the privileged 26-year-old computer engineer flipped a switch, went off the grid and allegedly gunned UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold-blood outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown.
Exclusive photos, obtained by The Post, show the murder suspect having fun in the sun, dining with tanned pals and even frolicking with a pair of beauties during his time at the penthouse in Surfbreak, a “co-living” space in Honolulu near Waikiki, where he stayed from January to June in 2022 paying $2,000-a-month.
In one photo, the murder suspect cuddled up next to a grinning woman, Tracy Le, with his arm draped behind her on a couch. Aanother snap shows Mangione tickling the gal pal and another woman in a hallway.
“There was no simmering anger that was visible,” Josiah Ryan, a Surfbreak spokesperson, told The Post.
Instagram @tracy.meomeo
Le, a data engineer in New York City, posted the pictures on her Instagram account in April 2022, with the caption, “So many people I love in one picture.”
Mangione was “the only name whose FaceTime calls I would pick up. He was one of my absolute best, closest, most trusted friends,” she wrote in the caption of a TikTok video, which showed Mangione — who now stands accused of killing Brian Thompson, 50, on the streets of Midtown — holding mochi ice cream at a grocery store with a giggling alongside Le.
The Post reached out to a number of the individuals depicted in the pictures, including Le, none of whom responded to a request for comment or an interview.
The NYPD is exploring whether a July 2023 back injury fueled Mangione’s apparent hatred toward to the medical industry.
Mangione, who was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., following a five-day manhunt, was found with a three-page manifesto accusing “parasitic” health insurance companies of corporate greed.
The accused killer was locked up without bail at State Correctional Institution in Huntington, Pa., and is fighting extradition orders to ship him back to New York. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to the slew of charges against him, including murder and illegal gun possession.
His jail cell is a far cry from the alleged killer’s beginnings. Mangione’s grandfather, the family patriarch Nick Mangione Sr., built a network of businesses that ranged from developing and owning local resorts and country clubs to nursing homes and a radio station in Baltimore.
There, he attended the $35,000-per-year Gilman School where he became valedictorian, but appeared shy socially.
“I don’t remember him ever having a serious girlfriend. He was very shy with girls,” a classmate who asked to be anonymous told The Post.
Painful Paradise
Mangione, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, was working remotely as a data engineer at California-based auto website TrueCar Inc. in 2022 when he moved to Surfbreak as a respite from his chronic pain.
“He communicated that being in Hawaii might be good for his health concerns. I heard that he had some brain fog,” Ryan recalled, noting Mangione underwent a background check and paid his own way at Surfbreak, where he had his own room and shared a kitchen and living space with housemates in the high rise building.
“He was well liked by people. He wasn’t a big partier or anything like that. He loved hiking and doing things with people. He [helped start] a book club,” Ryan said.
But, the Maryland native’s medical issues took a turn for the worse after he strained his back during a group surfing lesson that worsened his already injured lower back, according to R.J. Martin, who became friends with Mangione in 2022.
“His spine was kind of misaligned,” Martin told The New York Times.
“He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.”
Seeking pain relief, Mangione began practicing yoga with Dorian Wright, a Honolulu-based yoga teacher, between 2022 and 2023. He remembers Mangione’s movement being limited during a back bending pose.
“He was very clear when he told me where his back injury was … He was receptive of me helping him work through his injury,” Wright said.
Another teacher at the studio, named Summer, instantly recognized the University of Pennsylvania grad from his Tinder profile which she had matched with, according to Wright.
“One of our teachers matched with him on Tinder. She was taking my class at the same time as he was. She was like, ‘I wanted to go up to him and ask him out on a date, but I was too nervous,” Wright recalled of Mangione’s dating profile where he appeared smiling in a navy hoodie crouched down with an active volcano in the background of his profile photo.
Mangione listed travel, reading, hiking and working out as his interests.
“He’s a tall good looking guy – that’s the only person I know who he [Mangione] was going to potentially go on a date with,” Wright told The Post.
But life wasn’t all sunshine for the brunette bachelor. In July, 2023, Mangione took to Reddit to post about slipping on a piece of paper, noting it hurt to sit down and that his leg muscles were twitching. He reported numbness in his groin.
Martin told The Times this seemingly sidelined Mangione’s sex life, because “he knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible.”
The back pain became so severe, he consulted with doctors and eventually quit his job in 2023 to spend time reading and doing yoga.
It’s unclear if Mangione was covered for healthcare during that time. An NYPD official confirmed Thursday the Ivy League grad was never a client of UnitedHealthcare medical insurance.
Free Fall
He continued to read about big pharma and the medical industry, including books such as “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery’’ and “Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease ― and How to Fight It.” The titles were added to his virtual bookshelf on Goodreads between May 2022 and February 2023.
The reading list also linked to handwritten notes by Mangione that detailed he was suffering form spondylolisthesis, a condition that causes a vertebra to slip or shift into the vertebra below.
He traveled from Hawaii back to the East Coast for spinal fusion surgery in July, 2023, later texting Martin on Aug. 10 a photo of his spinal X-rays, The Times reported.
Mangione returned to Hawaii after the surgery, and moved into a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment in February, records show, though it’s unclear if he lived alone.
He appeared to become more radicalized, praising Unabomber Ted Kaczynski 35,000-word manifesto on in a four-star review on his Goodreads page, calling the domestic terrorist — responsible for a series of bombings over a 17 year time period to call attention society’s dependence on technology — a “political revolutionary.”
After March this year he stopped responding to messages from friends and then even his own family and his movement and whereabouts between then and the Dec. 4 shooting.
A concerned friend texted in June, “where in the world are you?” to no reply.
Mangione’s family reported him missing on November, 18 in San Francisco. Just days later he arrived in New York City on a Greyhound bus from Atlanta, according to sources, to scope out the scene and allegedly carry out his twisted plan to shoot down Thompson with a ghost gun he had 3-D printed.
“He was in a lot of pain and needed a lot of help,” another high school classmate told The Post.
“Of course I’m shocked but there was a darkness to him that was always there.”
Hawaii
Suspect arrested in attempted armed robbery on North Shore
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Police have arrested a suspect in a violent attempted robbery on Oahu’s North Shore. Another suspect still has not been located.
Police said the two men approached another man in Mokuleia Friday night. One of the men allegedly assaulted the victim while the other one threatened him with a handgun.
According to police records, the suspects ran off when the victim called police.
Officers later identified one of the suspects as a 50-year-old man. He was arrested Tuesday and faces possible charges of robbery in the first degree.
Copyright 2026 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.
Hawaii
Few state bills this year face potential veto – West Hawaii Today
Hawaii
Hawaii displays historic photos of Martin Luther King Jr. wearing flower lei during Selma march
HONOLULU — Photographs of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. adorned with flower lei from Hawaii residents who traveled to Selma, Alabama, to join him on a pivotal Civil Rights march went on public display Tuesday in the state Capitol in Honolulu.
The Selma-to-Montgomery marches galvanized passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which did away with most barriers such as poll taxes and other forms of voter discrimination targeting Black Americans in the Deep South.
A delegation of five people brought dozens of flower lei with them from Hawaii to Alabama in March 1965. Images of King wearing lei, garlands that are synonymous with Hawaiian culture, have been previously published — but most of the photos displayed in Hawaii’s new exhibit have never been seen before. Some photos have subtle variations, while others include figures who may have been deemed unimportant at the time. The exhibit runs through July 7.
One of the lei-bearers was Charles Campbell, a high school teacher and chairman of the Hawaii Civil Rights Conference, who a March 20, 1965 article in The Honolulu Advertiser quoted as saying: “Selma has the capability of becoming a real sore that could affect the entire nation.”
King was photographed wearing lei about two weeks after the event known as Bloody Sunday when state troopers violently attacked Civil Rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965.
The photos were taken by Civil Rights photographer Matt Herron, whose widow donated them to Hawaii’s Department of Accounting and General Services for the state’s archives.
After the photos were unveiled, Steven Springel stared at a photo of his mother, Nona Ferdon, who was a divorced mother of two children and a graduate student when she traveled to Selma.
This photo provided by Jeannine Herron shows Charles Campbell, who traveled to Alabama for the march from Selma to Montgomery, placing a lei on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Brown Chapel AME in Selma, Ala., March 21, 1965. Credit: AP/Matt Herron
Springel remembers he was just about to turn 7 and only realized as an adult how important her trip was. Growing up in Hawaii, “we never experienced segregation or racial inequality,” he said of his and his sister’s childhood. Ferdon died in 2021.
The exhibit, part of Hawaii’s programming to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, is a reminder people from the Aloha State participated in an important event in history, said Keith Regan, who oversees the department as the state’s comptroller and presided over the photo unveiling as acting governor while Gov. Josh Green is out of state.
The small delegation traveled thousands of miles “to be a part of the Civil Rights movement, to show ‘aloha’ to the world that Hawaii was there holding hands with our fellow brothers and sisters to ensure equality and justice were heard throughout the nation,” he said.
The Hawaii members also wore lei during first day of the 50-mile (80.46-kilometer) march. Mothers of Kawaiahaʻo Church in Honolulu strung together fragrant plumeria plucked from church grounds to assemble the lei.
This photo provided by Jeannine Herron shows Nona Ferdon, a graduate student who accompanied the Hawaii delegation that traveled to Alabama in 1965 for the march for voting rights, attends the march in Selma, Ala., March 21, 1965. Credit: AP/Matt Herron
Giving lei, a word that is both singular and plural in the Hawaiian language, continues to be a way to share the “aloha” spirit. People in Hawaii give and receive lei for all kinds of reasons, including to celebrate birthdays and promotions, or to show appreciation or recognition.
Tomi Knaefler, who had traveled with the delegation as a reporter with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, planned to attend Tuesday’s news conference. But at 96 years old, she wasn’t feeling up to it, said her daughter, Pamela MacDonald, who did attend.
MacDonald said she was 14 when her mother went on the assignment, “the one that she holds dearest to her heart.”
The exhibit comes at the end of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2026 term, which included a ruling gutting the remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act, setting off a wave of partisan gerrymandering in states in the South and endangering generations of gains in Black political representation.
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