A smiling assassin guns down one of the US’s biggest healthcare bosses in the middle of Manhattan using bullets carved with a chilling message before seemingly vanishing into thin air.
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has more than enough ingredients to set social media ablaze with armchair detectives and true crime fans scrambling to find their own leads.
But some of America’s highest profile amateur sleuths are flat out refusing to help this time.
Thompson’s murder has sparked huge anger – but not at the killer.
TikTok sleuth thatdaneshguy told his two million followers in a video: ‘I don’t have to encourage violence. I don’t have to condone violence by any means. But I also don’t have to help.’
Savannah Sparks, who has reportedly been tapped up by police to help train officers in how to track suspects online, told NBC when asked whether she is working on the case: ‘Absolutely the f**k not.’
Michael McWhorter, better known as TizzyEnt on TikTok, explained in a video: ‘I have yet to see anyone online posting “we gotta find this guy, we gotta get him off the street”.
‘I have, however, seen people making an argument doing the “hear me out” thing, talking about how attractive [the killer] is, people calling him Robin Hood, people quite literally making fan art, and I don’t think it’s that difficult to figure out why.
‘I don’t think there’s a single person in this country who hasn’t themselves or had someone very very near and dear to them suffer from the absolutely abysmal thing that is privatised healthcare in this country.
‘People every day are denied – for the most ridiculous reasons, sometimes even though they should be given care – in the hopes that they will die before they can actually get the services that they have paid for.
‘So, when a man who is quite literally the face of that was murdered, the nation for the most part seemed to collectively shrug.’
Alex Goldenberg, an adviser at The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University told NBC: ‘The surge of social media posts praising and glorifying the killing of Brian Thompson is deeply concerning.’
UnitedHealth is the largest US health insurer, providing benefits to tens of millions of Americans, who pay more for healthcare than people in any other country.
Thompson joined UnitedHealth in 2004 and became the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, in April 2021, reportedly earning around $10 million a year.
A Gallup poll released on Friday found that Americans believe the quality of health care is at a 24-year low.
Sukrit Venkatagiri, an assistant professor of computer science at Swarthmore College, told NBC: ‘They don’t really empathize with who the victim is in this scenario.
‘People are less motivated, from an altruistic perspective, to help this victim in this specific case.’
Following the attack, UnitedHealth and several other health insurers including CVS Health and Centene, removed pictures of executives from their corporate websites in an apparent tightening of security measures.
Centene said on Thursday it would no longer hold an in-person investor day next week, and that the event would be streamed.
The words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ were carved into shell casings found at the scene, police sources told several media outlets.
A New York City Police Department spokesperson would not comment on the report.
The words evoke the title of Jay Feinman’s 2010 book critical of the insurance industry ‘Delay Deny Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It’.
Feinman, a professor emeritus at Rutgers University Law School, declined to comment.
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