Investigators also are looking into words, including “delay” and “deny,” that appear to have been inscribed on casings collected after Brian Thompson was shot outside a Midtown hotel.
The authorities released two images they said showed the face of the man they believe fatally shot the chief executive of one of the largest health insurers in the country.
Investigators seemed closer to identifying the gunman on Thursday, a day after the shooting took place outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
As one of the nation’s largest health insurers, covering more than 50 million people, UnitedHealthcare has battled a range of complaints and investigations from patients, doctors and lawmakers for its denial of medical claims.
Those practices may face new scrutiny after law enforcement officials said that the bullet casings found at the site of the killing of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson on Wednesday appeared to have messages, including the words “deny” and “delay,” written on them.
The shooter’s motive and identity still remained unknown on Thursday, and no evidence has emerged that the killer was a UnitedHealthcare customer.
Police officers in Maple Grove, Minn., where Brian Thompson lived, investigated a bomb threat targeting his residence on Wednesday, about 12 hours after he was gunned down in Midtown Manhattan.
A police report released Thursday says the small suburban department sought help from the Minneapolis bomb squad as they searched two residences fruitlessly.
The report does not make clear whether the threat was linked to the killing.
Thompson’s death has unleashed a torrent of criticism of insurance companies over claim denials, in particular UnitedHealthcare, which he led.
Peter Dering, the founder and chief executive of Peak Design, looked down at his phone Wednesday morning in San Francisco and saw about 10 texts, some from people he had not heard from in years.
They had sent pictures and an urgent question: “This your backpack?”
The gunman who killed the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday morning appeared to have used a silencer, a tightly regulated firearm accessory that has long been associated with Hollywood hit men but is rarely seen in real-life murders.
Also called suppressors, silencers are cylinders screwed into the muzzle of a gun that dampen noise by redirecting the gases released when a round is fired.
Though legal in 42 states, they have been subject to federal restrictions since the days of Prohibition-era gang violence.
Purchasing one requires submitting fingerprints and a photograph, undergoing a background check and paying a $200 transfer tax.
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
Investigators are looking into the purchase of a gun that resembles the weapon used in the shooting, according to two officials briefed on the investigation.
The purchase was made in Connecticut, the officials said, and investigators are trying to determine whether the buyer of the gun could be the suspect.
Mayor Eric Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday that he believed investigators were on the right path and are “going to apprehend this person.”
“In all of my years of law enforcement, I have never seen a silencer before,” the mayor said.
“And so that was really something that was shocking to us all.”
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN.
“Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
John Nielsen, 59, is visiting the city from Denmark and has spent the past eight days in the Manhattan hostel where the police say the suspect also stayed.
He said when he returned to the hostel at about 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, there were “a lot of police,” and that officers went up and down the floors of the building “many times.”
Nielsen questioned the man’s decision to stay at the hostel.
“That the person stays this place, that’s not clever, because there is recording, video all over the place,” Nielsen said.
“You don’t check in in a place with so many people.”
Arturo Rodriguez, 33, who is visiting the city from Mexico, checked into the same hostel on Sunday.
He said he had plans to spend Wednesday in Midtown but changed his plans out of fear after hearing of the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive.
Learning that the suspected gunman might have stayed in the same hostel has only made him more anxious, he said.
“Maybe he has sleeped with me, maybe in the same room,” he said, adding that during his stay he has shared a room with many men and women.
Shown photos of the police released showing the suspect’s face, he said he did not recognize him.
The authorities do not yet have the suspect’s name but are pursuing several leads, a senior law enforcement official said.
The official added that comparisons of the possible suspect names and the photo of the suspect released this morning were inconclusive.
The person who appeared in the photos released on Thursday morning checked out of the hostel on the Upper West Side on Wednesday, the official said.
About half a dozen journalists stood outside the HI New York City Hostel on Thursday morning, where a senior law enforcement official said the suspect stayed recently and where he was photographed without a facemask.
A police flier about the search for the shooter was pinned on a nearby lamp post.
Police officials released two new surveillance photos on Thursday of the alleged gunman — the first to show most of his face.
Both of the images show a man wearing what appears to be a green jacket, and what appears to be a black face mask around his neck and a backpack.
He is smiling in one of the photos.
It is unclear when the photos were taken.
A senior law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation said that the authorities have an image of the suspected gunman’s face from when he stayed at a hostel near 103rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.
The man shared a room with two other men who were strangers, the official said. It was not immediately clear when the image was taken.
The gray backpack used by the gunman appears to be one sold by Peak Design, a company that specializes in bags that sell for up to $330.
The company advertises bags that provide “unrivaled organization, protection, and access” and were originally designed for photographers.
The police have not identifed what kind of backpack the gunman had, but at a news conference Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives, described it as “distinctive.”
UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, has come under fierce criticism from patients, lawmakers and others for denying patients’ claims.
A doctor or hospital may determine that a patient needs medical treatment, but an insurer, which is responsible for paying for that treatment, can still determine that the care does not meet its criteria for coverage and refuse to pay the bill.
In some cases, the denial comes in the form of a refusal to authorize the care before it is delivered, but in other cases, patients can be left with hefty medical bills that they must pay out of their own pockets.
More recently, UnitedHealthcare and other insurers have been the subject of scrutiny over denial rates in their private Medicare Advantage plans.
Last fall, the majority staff of a Senate panel released a scathing report on insurers’ refusal to pay for care for older people who have suffered falls or strokes.
UnitedHealthcare, in particular, was cited for a surge in denials for what is called post-acute care.
Under United’s system of prior authorization, the report found, the denial rate for post-acute care increased to 22.7 percent in 2022 from 10.9 percent in 2020.
Government-funded plans have provided the most reliable data on denial rates by insurers.
But insurers have regularly balked at releasing data on claims and denials for private plans, including those provided to employers to cover their workers.
The police are now investigating apparent messages found on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting, according to two law enforcement officials.
Ballistics testing is continuing, the official said, but the casings appear to have been inscribed with words including “delay” and “deny” — potentially references to ways that health insurance companies seek to avoid paying patients’ claims.
While they have multiple meanings, the words “delay” and “deny” could be a reference to the ways insurance companies seek to fend off claims.
A 2010 book on the topic, “Delay, Deny, Defend,” argues that health insurers’ claims departments try to increase their profits by not honoring the terms of insurance policies, shortchanging policyholders. The author, Jay M.
Feinman, is a professor emeritus at Rutgers Law School.
Reached on Thursday morning, Feinman declined to comment.
The police are now investigating whether the gunman escaped on an unmarked e-bike, not a Citi Bike as officials had previously said, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
A spokesman for Lyft, which operates Citi Bike in New York, said late Wednesday that the company had been informed that the gunman did not use a Citi Bike, though the Police Department has not confirmed that.
The cameras caught the gunman standing alone for five minutes on West 54th Street, ignoring the early-morning rush of people streaming by.
They caught him again as he stood in the dark at 6:44 a.m. and locked onto his target, Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, who was walking on the other side of the street.
Dozens of chief security officers from Fortune 500 corporations around the world joined a video call on Wednesday afternoon, hours after the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.
Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan, to discuss additional protective measures for executives moving around the area, according to a security expert who participated in the conversation.
The discussion included best practices and reviews of executive protection programs, according to the expert, Dave Komendat, a retired chief security officer at Boeing and president of DSKomendat Risk Management Services, a consultancy based in the Seattle area.
He said that all of the security officers on the video call were facing upper-echelon requests for presentations on the current state of their security programs and scrutinizing their own practices.
It’s the quintessential Manhattan hotel, somehow both drab and sleek, an emblem of the gray and glass aesthetic of the city that appears in thousands of beloved Hollywood films and series.
The Midtown Hilton — or technically, the New York Hilton Midtown — is one of the city’s largest hotels, and the largest Hilton in the continental United States, with nearly 2,000 rooms.
Nestled inconspicuously on West 54th Street, among the marble towers of S*xth Avenue, not far from the Museum of Modern Art and Rockefeller Center, it has hosted the Emmy Awards, Donald Trump’s victory speech in 2016, Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the journalists who holed up in its rooms with the Pentagon Papers.
It has appeared in sitcoms and films, from “Seinfeld” to “Michael Clayton.”
And has generally seen history go by since opening its doors in the 1960s, in addition to countless corporate conferences.
Brian Thompson spent more than 20 years climbing through the ranks at UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers and a main division of the conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, and there were no signs that his ascent was slowing.
He had been chief executive of the insurance division since 2021, overseeing a period of substantial profits.
The division reported $281 billion in revenues last year, providing coverage to millions of Americans through the health plans it sold to individuals, employers and people under government programs like Medicare.
The division employed roughly 140,000 people.