CEO shooting suspect left winding trail of Reddit posts about health issues

Snippets of social media posts and discussions on popular message board Reddit offer a glimpse into the life of the man charged with killing the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare.

Luigi Mangione, 26, appeared to reference his health problems and a bevy of symptoms that nagged at his day-to-day function spanning more than a decade.

Mangione appears to have posted on the site Reddit under the username “Mister_Cactus,” based in part on one post that refers to a page he maintained on GitHub, a computer code sharing platform.

While his account was disabled by Reddit on Monday, some of the posts are still visible through publicly accessible websites that archive previous posts and other users who captured old versions, including by those with suspended accounts.

He wrote an uplifting post in August 2023 on a sub-Reddit for spondylolisthesis, a USA TODAY review of the Reddit posts shows. The condition occurs when spinal bones slip out of place and can cause chronic lower back and leg pain, according to the Mayo Clinic. The post was meant to encourage others suffering from back pain.

“It can be easy to get caught up in the plethora of horror stories on the Internet,” the username tied to Mangione wrote. “When my spondy went bad on me last year it was completely devastating as a young athletic person. Seemingly all I could read on the internet was that I was destined to chronic pain and a desk job for the rest of my life. That representation was terrifying, inaccurate and completely destroyed me until I realized the silent majority of fusions are highly successful.”

He offered advice on stretching exercises and to visit a physical therapist. His posts often had a communal support undercurrent: “the symptoms you’re describing suck, and are 100% real.”

His pain began in January 2022, he posted. In July 2023, he said his “back and hips locked up after the accident and my whole lumbar / hips have been out of wack (sic) since then.”

Responding to another post in July 29, 2023, he wrote that he had suffered bladder and genital pain, back pain and sciataca after the back injury. He had also started to have numbness in his groin and bladder and below the right knee. “In my case, it is due to my piriformis / hip muscles tightening to compensate for my injury,” he wrote. “The tightness squeezes my nerves. It doesn’t show up on MRI and no doc has really confirmed it.”

In a thread where another user asked for advice about surgery on the lumbosacral joint known as L5-S1, the username tied to Mangione wrote about his own procedure: “The surgery wasn't nearly as scary as I made it out to be in my head, and I knew it was the right decision within a week.”

An X social media banner tied to Mangione features an X-ray of a back procedure showing a spinal fusion with bolts fusing his vertebrae together.

In other Reddit posts from "Mister_Cactus," he referenced health battles with Lyme disease as a teenager and "brain fog" that accompanied it. He missed soccer tryouts when he contracted Lyme at 13 and didn’t make the team, then started noticing “mild cognitive decline” when he was 15, he posted. He said his symptoms severely worsened in 2017, when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, but additional tests for Lyme disease were negative.

In July 2018 he posted about having restless sleep and in August that year he posted in a group about irritable bowel syndrome , asking for advice about a change in diet to improve his condition.

Although Mangione had at times been active on social media, and his Facebook account lists 1,200 friends, he had gone silent in recent months. He hadn’t posted on X since June. He hadn’t posted on Facebook in years.

On X in April, he recommended a news story as a relevant read, saying "Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods.”

In January, he posted that he felt “lucky for my 21st century education.”

“I get to simply download the knowledge of all who came before me, allowing me to stand on their shoulders and ponder new problems they never would've had access to," he wrote.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Reddit posts, social media, offer clues in CEO murder case