Judge says he’s hopeful hearing on Luigi Mangione trial evidence will end this week

NEW YORK (AP) — A judge said Tuesday he’s optimistic that a pretrial hearing will end this week in Luigi Mangione’s New York murder case in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

“Hopefully we wind up on Thursday,” Judge Gregory Carro said at the hearing, which is in its third week of testimony.

Mangione, 27, is seeking to exclude items seized during his Dec. 9, 2024, arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania, including a gun and notebook that prosecutors say tie him to Thompson’s shooting five days earlier in Manhattan.

Prosecutors have called more than a dozen witnesses so far, with at least one more expected after an off-day on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, a Pennsylvania police evidence custodian, a New York City police homicide commander and an investigative analyst from the Manhattan district attorney’s office testified.

Mangione has pleaded not guilty to state and federal murder charges. The pretrial hearing applies only to the state case. His lawyers are making a similar push to exclude the evidence from his federal case, where prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Mangione was arrested after customers spotted him eating breakfast at a McDonald’s in Altoona, a Pennsylvania city of about 44,000 people some 230 miles (370 kilometers) west of Manhattan. The restaurant’s manager told a 911 dispatcher customers thought “he looks like the CEO shooter from New York.”

Mangione’s lawyers contend that anything found in Mangione’s backpack should be excluded from his trial because police didn’t have a search warrant and lacked the grounds to justify a warrantless search.

Prosecutors say the search was legal because it was conducted in conjunction with an arrest and officers were checking to make sure there were no dangerous items in the bag that could be harmful to them or the public. Police eventually obtained a warrant, prosecutors said.

Items seized during that search include a 9 mm handgun that prosecutors said matches the one used to kill Thompson and a notebook in similar handwriting in which he purportedly described his intent to “wack” a health insurance executive.

The Altoona police department’s evidence custodian, Officer George Featherstone, testified Tuesday that he logged evidence collected during Mangione’s arrest and placed it in labeled evidence bags and envelopes before turning it over to the NYPD.

NYPD Lt. David Leonardi, the commanding officer of the detective squad that investigated Thompson’s killing, testified that before going to Altoona he told a police sergeant there: “I would like no one to speak to him and all of the property held.”

Leonardi said he raced to Altoona with a team of detectives and personally drove the evidence back to Manhattan, where it was delivered to the NYPD’s crime laboratory for testing.

Investigative Analyst Anissa Weisel testified about a timeline she created of events surrounding Mangione’s arrest. Mangione’s lawyers objected, saying the timeline was missing too much information. Carro agreed, but said he’d only use the timeline as an aid to help him review body-worn camera footage and other material submitted during the hearing.