David Kaczynski, the brother of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, said he hopes his brother wasn’t a model for the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting.
“I think we always have to remember that human motivation is extremely complicated,” Kaczynski said in a phone interview with NBC News.
“Many factors go into a person’s motivation that they drastically act like this, and I hope my brother wasn’t a key model for him,” he said about the suspect.
Luigi Mangione has been arrested and charged Monday in connection with the murder of CEO Brian Thompson.
Thompson was shot and killed in New York City last week, and a manhunt ensued looking for the masked and hooded suspect. Mangione was arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s after an employee alerted law enforcement.
Ted Kaczynski died in federal custody last year at 81. He mailed and hand-delivered a series of homemade bombs over the course of 17 years that killed and injured more than 20 people.
His bombs targeted various universities, an American Airlines flight, the president of United Airlines and a Boeing manufacturing facility.
The Unabomber, as he was famously known, was a Harvard-educated math prodigy that criticized technology systems.
As details emerge about Mangione, it’s known that he graduated from University of Pennsylvania, and graduated as his high school’s valedictorian.
David Kaczynski said it causes him a “great deal of personal pain” to think that his brother’s actions in the past could have “in any way contributed to influencing a man like this to kill an innocent human being.”
After his arrest, Mangione has garnered online sympathy and support, partly due to many people who have issues with the health insurance industry.
David Kaczynski cautioned against thinking someone like his brother could be a hero, calling his brother’s actions “a virus.”
“To the extend that he may have attributed at all to sort of normalizing or recasting the violent acts as beneficial to humanity is a terrible mistake,” he said.
