I Would Not Take My Post-Assassination Meal At An Altoona McDonald’s, But I Guess I’m Built Different

Everybody I know has had theories and/or lurid fantasies about the masked individual who shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street on Dec. 4, hopped on a getaway bicycle, and then eluded quick capture for (at least) four days. Mine was that anybody who had their shit together enough to anticipate Thompson’s walking route to an early-morning shareholders meeting, to calmly gun the executive down in front of onlookers, and to make a clean escape from the scene before anyone could apprehend or recognize or even follow him, would also have their shit together enough to have pre-booked a quick and frictionless exit from the United States, taking advantage of New York City’s numerous, uh, points of egress or whatever. Assuming a tight schedule and reasonable but not desperate haste, I thought the assassin could fairly straightforwardly chuck the gun and (reported) fake ID and board an international flight out of the city under his own real name within a couple hours of the shooting. In that case he’d be gone long before the police had anything more to search for than “a person, possibly blurry, possibly wearing a coat.” I am not too ashamed to admit that I kind of hoped for this: Then we would never have to go through the exhausting and familiar ritual of trying to unpack the killer’s politics.

As for the NYPD, the nation’s largest and most extravagantly funded police force apparently had its own theory. Namely, that the masked assassin, having gunned down a public figure in the middle of a city of millions, at the nexus of innumerable flight networks, rail lines, and highways, was now crouching under or possibly directly behind a bush adjacent to a walking path in Central Park, perhaps while chanting “I am the assassin.”

Within hours, the city’s panopticon of digital surveillance cameras seemed to have picked up the possible assassin’s trail at a youth hostel, and in a couple of other places; they distributed a still image of a strikingly handsome young lad pulling his mask down to (reportedly) flirt with a hostel employee. By Friday afternoon when the killer had been at large for some 30 hours or more, the police finally developed a lead:

An unspecified reason to believe that someone, a “person of interest,” had left the city. The public is left to speculate as to the nature of that reason to believe; possibilities include “Because he’s not standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue yelling ‘IT FEELS GREAT TO HAVE SHOT AND KILLED THAT GUY,'” and, “Because we haven’t found him yet,” and, “Because people generally attempt to get away with the major crimes they’ve committed.”

Listen, bub. You do not just stroll into New York City and shoot a rich guy on camera and then think that you are going to stroll back out. Do you even know the sophisticated technology at the NYPD’s disposal? Can you even conceive of it?

With the power of AI, there simply is no limit to the number of conveniently placed bushes, benches, and halal carts visibly swollen and sweaty officers might sorta half-crouch and peek under. Utilizing AI’s ability to analyze bone structure, detectives would have no trouble generating a high-resolution image of the killer’s entire face, including all five of his eyeballs and the identifying spot on his left cheek where his mouth breaks up into a spray of a dozen nostrils. Who could hope to elude the very same technology that identified every one-year-old in Gaza as a hardened Hamas terrorist?

Perhaps only a true criminal mastermind:

“I don’t think I’ve seen this level of operational preplanning in any crime, never mind in a murder,” said Kenneth E. Corey, a former chief of department in the New York Police Department.

Heretofore unimagined levels of operational preplanning! A pistol, a bicycle, and the wherewithal and intent to use them: Your high-end professional contract killer might possess any two of these, but all three? Now we are in the realm of speculation. Of fantasy. We are talking about some type of Ernst Stavro Blofeld type of guy. The hardest of hard targets.

I will confess: I did not think any of this would turn out to matter very much, at least not anytime soon. I figured at some point law enforcement almost certainly would figure out the killer’s identity, but since he was an organized, competent type who seemed to have clearly planned this whole thing, the most they’d be able to nail down is by what means he’d left the country within hours of the shooting. Maybe some antagonist nation-state would even offer him sanctuary, as a sort of finger in the eye to the U.S. government, and it would turn into an Edward Snowden type of deal.

What I—and, perhaps more germanely, the NYPD and FBI—did not expect was that their person of interest, five days out from (apparently) gunning down a powerful CEO in the middle of Manhattan, would stroll into a McDonalds in Altoona, Pa., on Monday, reportedly carrying on his person not only the same distinctive type of pistol used in the killing but also a written manifesto reportedly enumerating the evils of the health insurance industry. At which point a restaurant employee evidently recognized him from the surveillance photo and called the police, to whom the person of interest presented the same fake ID shown at the Manhattan hostel days before. Officials have not confirmed this detail, but I can only assume based on the reported facts that he was also wearing an ASK ME ABOUT MY TRIP TO NYC T-shirt.

There’s still a lot to learn about this whole thing! The biggest unknown remains, for all the reports that have him all but sauntering into an Altoona police station and asking to try on a pair of handcuffs, whether the person now in custody actually is the shooter, or just the apparent victim of a series of baffling coincidences, terrible luck, and/or some type of frame job. If he is the assassin, then I have to say, I am pretty disappointed!

Altoona?? McDonald’s??? The cops were out here asking Siri, What would you look like if you killed a guy? and checking behind only some of the curtains in their own living rooms over a span of time in which a reasonably motivated and with-it assassin could have made his way to friggin’ Papua New Guinea—by rowboat!—and this guy moseyed over to Altoona for a burger lunch? And was undone by his own good looks? World-historic “operational preplanning” and he couldn’t score a pair of Groucho Marx glasses for the Quarter Pounder stage of the mission. The Jackal would never go down this way.