Man with chainsaw fatally shot by police inside senior-living facility, officials say
The entrance doors of the River Glen of St. Charles, in St. Charles, Illinois, are seen in a screengrab of a video shot Sunday, Dec. 1, 2024. (WLS)
(ST. CHARLES, IL) — A man wielding a chainsaw inside a senior-living facility in St. Charles, Illinois, was shot and killed by police early Sunday, state and local law enforcement said.
The man, whom police have not publicly identified, was allegedly attempting to cut down a tree on the facility’s property at about 8:45 a.m. on Sunday. He was “shirtless” when police arrived at the facility, on the 900 block of North 5th Avenue, the St. Charles Police Department said in a press statement.
“Just before police arrival, witnesses advised the subject had now gained entry to the lobby of the building and began confronting residents with the chainsaw,” the department said.
Officers sought to deescalate the situation, but “the suspect continued his attempts to use the chainsaw against residents of the building,” as well as against responding officers, the department said.
Officers used a taser on the man, “but his attack continued,” the press statement said. An officer then fired his gun, striking the alleged attacker, police said.
“The male suspect was transported to an area hospital where he was pronounced deceased,” the Illinois State Police said in a press release.
Officers and residents of the assisted-living facility were treated at the scene for minor injuries, police said.
“We are deeply grateful for the swift action of our team and law enforcement,” a spokesperson for the facility, the River Glen of St. Charles, said in a statement. “We want to emphasize that our community is secure, and all residents and staff members are safe.”
The Illinois State Police said it would investigate the shooting.
Thomas Dickey, attorney for suspected shooter Luigi Mangione, on ABC News’ “Good Morning America” Wednesday, December 11.
(NEW YORK) — Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old Ivy League graduate accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in front of a New York City hotel last week, has retained a private defense attorney in his Pennsylvania gun charges case.
Mangione was apprehended in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday following a dayslong manhunt. Police said he was found with multiple fake IDs, including a fake New Jersey ID matching the one that the suspect allegedly used to check into a hostel in New York City before the shooting, a 3D-printed pistol and a 3D-printed silencer.
He has been charged in Pennsylvania with carrying a gun without a license, forgery, falsely identifying himself to authorities and possessing “instruments of crime,” according to a criminal complaint.
Mangione plans to plead not guilty to the charges in Pennsylvania, his defense attorney, Thomas Dickey, told reporters on Tuesday.
Dickey said he anticipates Mangione would also plead not guilty to the second-degree murder charge he faces in New York in connection with Thompson’s death.
Has refrained from saying how he came to represent Mangione
The Altoona-based attorney has been making the press rounds since he was retained to represent Mangione, including ABC News’ Good Morning America and CNN.
But he could not confirm how he came to represent Mangione; he would only say he was retained Tuesday ahead of the suspect’s extradition hearing in Pennsylvania. He said he “of course” knew of the New York case but said, “I don’t follow a lot of things sometimes in news.”
The court denied Mangione bail during the hearing. Mangione plans to challenge his extradition to New York.
“He has constitutional rights and that’s what he’s doing” in challenging the interstate transfer, Dickey told reporters on Tuesday.
When asked how Mangione was feeling, the attorney brusquely said you can “use your common sense on that.” He later said that Mangione is “taking it as well as he can.”
The attorney told ABC News’ Good Morning America on Wednesday that anyone speculating on the case should take the potential evidence “in its entirety,” rather than take pieces of writing or other evidence “out of context.”
“People put out certain things, parts of different things,” he said. “I think any lawyer involved in this situation would want to see it all.”
“We’re looking forward to beginning our inquiry as to what evidence may or may not be out there,” he said.
Asked whether he would accept donations from members of the public seeking to fund his defense, Dickey said, “I don’t know.”
He told CNN that he probably wouldn’t.
“I just don’t feel comfortable about that,” he said. “It just doesn’t sit right with me, really.”
Asked about the outpouring of support for Mangione online, Dickey told reporters Tuesday, “People are entitled to their opinion.”
“If you’re an American, you believe in the American criminal justice system, you have to presume him to be innocent,” the attorney said. “And none of us would want anything other than that if that was us in their shoes. I’m glad that he has some support.”
Would consider representing suspect in New York murder case
Mangione could face additional charges in New York beyond second-degree murder, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
“As we learn more about motives and other things like that … there may be additional charges,” Bragg told ABC News on Wednesday.
Dickey told reporters Tuesday that if the opportunity presented itself to represent Mangione in the New York case, he “certainly would consider” it.
The attorney said he does not have a license to practice law in New York, but that “you can get admitted.”
“I’ve been doing this for 41 years, you can get admitted there,” he said, but added, “I don’t want to speculate about anything.”
Takes on cases ranging from capital murder to DUIs
Dickey is a lifelong resident of Blair County, home to Altoona, according to his bio on his law firm website.
He studied history and political science at Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, and earned his law degree from Ohio Northern University.
He opened his private practice in 1984. It takes on first-degree murder, DUI and state and federal drug cases, among others.
Dickey told reporters Tuesday he is “proud to say” that he is one of the few attorneys in Pennsylvania who is qualified to provide defense counsel in death penalty cases.
His decades-long career has included a 2009 double homicide in which he argued post-traumatic stress disorder as a defense for the defendant, an Iraqi War veteran.
“I argued to the jury in my opening [statement], I said I believe that the Iraq war came home that day,” Dickey told CNN following the trial.
The defendant was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison after the jury couldn’t agree on the death penalty.
Asked if Mangione’s was the biggest case he’s been on, Dickey told reporters, “They’re all big.”
(WASHINGTON) — For the family and friends of Jonathan Campos — the captain of American Airlines Flight 5342, which plunged into the Potomac River on Wednesday after colliding with a Black Hawk helicopter — the feelings of grief that followed the news of his death were quickly replaced by anger.
As President Donald Trump made unfounded claims blaming diversity, equity and inclusion policies for contributing to the midair collision, Campos’ former fiancee said her loved one’s death quickly became politicized, overshadowing his life story and interrupting the family’s grief.
“This man’s body hadn’t even been pulled out of the river yet, and we’re talking about him being unqualified because his name is Campos,” Nicole Suissa told ABC News.
One day after the deadliest American plane crash in over two decades, Trump suggested during a White House briefing that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation were partially to blame for the collision.
“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”
While the cause of the crash remains undetermined and families only beginning to grieve, blaming diversity hiring on the crash was “enraging” and “infuriating” Suissa said.
“What really irked me to no end was it was, the next day they published Jonathan’s name and Jonathan’s very Puerto Rican-looking face, all I could hear in the back of my head was all these people, all these DEI fear-mongering people going, ‘You see, I knew he’d be Hispanic,’ and I lost my mind,” Suissa said. “The politicization of this man’s death is entirely inappropriate. It is abhorrent. It is disgraceful. It is insensitive to say the least.”
As of Tuesday, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board were in the early stages of identifying the cause of the midair collision that killed 67 people combined on both aircraft. Authorities have been able to identify 55 sets of remains and are continuing to recover the fuselage of the commercial airliner from the Potomac.
As the recovery operation and investigation continues, Suissa said she hopes people remember Campos for the man she knew and loved for the last 20 years — someone who overcame the hardship of his life to achieve his goal of being a professional pilot before that dream was cut short.
“He was doing everything right. He did everything he was supposed to do,” she said. “He was a by-the-book pilot, and he did everything he was supposed to do, and I thought when you do everything right, that you get to live.”
Suissa first met Campos during their freshman year at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, New York, watching him work for years to achieve his life goal of becoming a pilot. A 2015 graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Campos flew aircraft for over a decade, including for at least six years with American Airlines. If anyone would have been able to safely land that plane last week, Suissa said she believes it would have been Campos.
“He would have done everything, everything in his power to land that plane because there were 60 people on it, and he never took that lightly,” she said.
Campos admired his father, who was an officer with the New York Police Department. But when his father died in 1999 of liver failure when Campos was just 9 years old, it fell on his stepmother and aunt to raise him. Both women traveled to Washington, D.C., after the crash to identify their son, Suissa said.
“I still wanted him to, you know, live this long, happy, fulfilling life, and I wanted him, I certainly wanted him to outlive his father,” she said. “For 15 years of my life, I thought I’d be signing his marriage license, not his death certificate. So here we are.”
Suissa herself knew Campos for more than 20 years, dating on and off, getting engaged before breaking it off, and ultimately settling on being close friends.
“It’s funny, actually, we each went to prom with someone else — more out of spite than anything,” she said. “Over the years, we had kind of accepted that the romantic piece of it was over, and we remained friends. We never really stopped talking to one another.”
Suissa — who is planning Campos’ funeral and serving as the family spokesperson — recounted their pastime of doing escape rooms across the country, including in Las Vegas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Orlando, Florida.
“We would beat the whole thing, just the two of us, in under an hour,” she said. “We sort of complemented each other in that way. Our temperaments didn’t complement each other, but our talents did.”
She described Campos as the ultimate adrenaline junkie, learning to instruct other pilots, fly helicopters, scuba dive, snowboard and skydive.
While Campos liked pushing his limits during his hobbies, Suissa said he took nothing as seriously as he did flying commercially. Epic Flight Academy — where Campos worked as an instructor — remembered him as “a skilled and dedicated pilot with an undeniable passion for flying.”
As she plans Campos’ funeral, she said she’s come to terms with the fact that he’s gone, though the political debate surrounding his death continues to enrage her.
“I don’t doubt for a moment that if there was anything at all he could have done to avert it, he would have,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — Police are questioning 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in Altoona, Pennsylvania, as a person of interest in connection with the brazen Midtown Manhattan murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, according to authorities.
Mangione, from Maryland, has been arrested by Altoona police on unrelated gun charges, according to authorities.
He was on a Greyhound bus traveling through Altoona on Monday morning, sources said, when he got off and walked into a McDonald’s where a witness recognized him from the images of the suspect circulated by police.
Mangione was sitting and eating when a McDonald’s employee reported him, and “because of that, we believe we have a strong person of interest,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at a news conference Monday.
“He matches the description of the person we are looking for,” Adams said.
Mangione had a ghost gun capable of firing a 9 mm round and a suppressor, police said.
Mangione was in possession of a handwritten document “that speaks to his motivation and mindset,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
“It does seem that he had some ill will toward corporate America,” police said.
Authorities are going through his writings more thoroughly to understand his motive.
He was also in possession of a fake New Jersey driver’s license similar to the one the suspect used to check into a hostel in New York City before the shooting, she said.
Tisch praised the “good old fashioned detective work” of the NYPD and the “power of the public” that led to the arrest.
Police said it appears he acted alone.
Police said they’re working to trace his movements from New York City to Pennsylvania.
Police said they did not have his name before now.
Meanwhile, new video obtained by ABC News shows the killer waiting for Thompson moments before the shooting.
The video shows others pass by, and then, when the masked gunman sees Thompson, he runs across the street and opens fire. The video, which has not previously been seen publicly, appears to support the police narrative that the shooter targeted Thompson because he loitered while others wandered by.
On Wednesday morning, the masked gunman shot Thompson at point-blank range outside the New York Hilton Midtown, where Thompson’s company was holding an investors conference. Tisch described the attack as “brazen” and “targeted.”
Right after the shooting, the suspect fled by bike through Central Park to the Upper West Side. He then took a taxi to the Port Authority bus facility at 178th Street and boarded a bus out of New York City, according to police.
On Sunday, members of the New York Police Department’s dive team searched underwater in Central Park near the Bethesda Fountain.
The suspect’s backpack — with a jacket and Monopoly money inside — was found nearby in Central Park.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Bill Hutchinson, Jon Haworth, Ivan Pereira and David Brennan contributed to this report.
