Summary
The NYPD released unmasked photos of the suspect in the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was shot outside the New York Hilton Midtown on Dec. 4.
Surveillance footage traced the suspect’s movements before and after the crime, including his escape on an e-bike.
Investigators uncovered cryptic words on shell casings at the scene and recovered items possibly containing DNA evidence.
Authorities are using facial recognition and offering a $10,000 reward for tips. NYC Mayor Eric Adams confirmed the attack was premeditated and involved a silencer. Motive remains unknown.
They’re not talking about the two unmasked photos in the article. If you look at the photos of the masked shooter, he had a different backpack (white/beige instead of black) and a different hoodie(no chest pockets).
Replying to my own comment for additional context:
I’m not saying it’s what happened here, but I’ve always figured that if I intended to commit a crime and escape, I’d change my outer clothes as fast as possible. If you were wearing a mask, if you put on a different jacket, backpack, hat, pants, and shoes you’re basically unrecognizable barring any recognizable scars or tattoos or whatever.
I don’t know how much time would have elapsed between the two pictures, but if you plan for it by wearing two layers, it wouldn’t take very long to pull a second bag from your backpack and stuff the first backpack and your jacket into the second pack.
It looks like the guy in both sets of pictures might be wearing the same sort of neck gaiter, but that’s pretty flimsy evidence to say the least
But why would you change into an extremely similar looking jacket and backpack and continue to walk around with the same face covering? Why would you not change into a yellow puffer jacket and put a Knicks beanie on and get rid of the damn backpack entirely?
Hypothetically, you’d still want to blend into the crowd, “yellow puffy jacket and Knicks hat” is pretty identifiable if someone were to see you changing your clothes, but darker colored midweight hooded jacket could probably describes like 75% of what everyone on any random street in New York is wearing at any given time in the winter.
And the backpacks look like they’re totally different colors. You also wouldn’t want to ditch the bag or clothes too close to the chime scene, don’t want to leave behind evidence that might be easily linked to you.
Can’t speak for the neck gaiter, a black gaiter is a pretty unremarkable article of clothing, I know a few people who have started wearing them semi regularly over the winter since COVID, it’s probably not enough to be identifiable on its own, he could have simply forgotten about it, it could be functional by hiding something identifiable (neck tattoos, scars, who knows, maybe even a tracheostomy that the insurance company fucked him over with in some way) he may have wanted to keep it readily at hand to quickly cover his face again if needed, etc.
I totally agree and that was a dumb and exaggerated example. My point was only that if it really is the same person, it is too subtle of a change between jackets, where a cop on high alert would take an interest. Why not change into a completely different style of nondescript coat in a completely different color like black?
The picture quality leaves a bit to be desired, but the two jackets do look pretty different to me. It looks like one may be a quarter zip without any chest pockets and the other is a full zip with chest pockets. And because of the differing picture qualities it’s kind of hard to say just how similar or different the colors are, they almost look like different colors from one picture of the same jacket to the other.
Also there may have been some deliberate choice in that sort of dark earth tone kind of color (or at least that’s what the colors look like to me,) different witnesses could give different answers for what color that jacket even is, I could imagine people calling it black, grey brown, tan, or green, depending on the lighting, how close they were, how much attention they paid, etc. on top of eyewitnesses just being kind of generally unreliable, so until they were able to get the security footage, which probably was at least a few minutes, cops could potentially have been working on conflicting descriptions of the jacket color.
Side note: I work in 911 dispatch, so I spend a lot of my nights trying to get descriptions of people and vehicles, I get a lot of people really struggling to tell me what color something is that’s right in front of them, and when we have multiple callers about something we’re often going to get as many different descriptions as there are callers. I remember one major incident I worked where depending on which caller you got, the description of the subject was either an older white guy wearing camo, a young black guy in a hoodie, or 3 white teenagers in trench coats.
It also looks like there was just another picture released where he was wearing what looks to me like a black or navy puffy jacket.
Also worth noting, I don’t think the NYPD has been totally clear about where these pictures were all taken on the timeline, one was taken at the hostel he was staying at and I’m not even totally clear if it’s actually from the same day as the shooting or not.