NEW YORK CITY, NY (WJAC) — Exactly one year after the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, in New York City, his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, was back inside a Manhattan courtroom for another day of pretrial motions.
The focus of this week’s proceedings has been on the Altoona Police Department, which arrested Mangione at a local McDonald’s after a five-day manhunt.
Mangione’s defense team claims that Altoona police violated his rights, and they want all the evidence found at that McDonald’s to be thrown out of his upcoming murder trial.
New video was shown in court on Thursday and is shedding new light on the circumstances leading up to Mangione’s arrest.
Thursday’s proceedings focused on rookie Altoona officer Tyler Frye, who was one of the two officers to first respond to the McDonald’s scene.
The state spent nearly four hours walking through body camera footage of Frye, from multiple viewpoints, during the first half of the hearing.
Mangione’s defense team then grilled Officer Frye on the stand for the latter half of the day.
Mangione’s defense team says police cornered him and left him to believe he was not free to leave the McDonald’s, because he was surrounded by officers.
Bodycam footage shows the two officers were alone with Mangione for over 10 minutes, but Frye remained in the entry way, arguably blocking Mangione’s only exit point from the corner booth table in the restaurant.
We also learned from Frye’s body camera that Mangione verbalized that he did not want to talk to police, within minutes of officers arriving.
Despite this, officers continued to question him for nearly 20 minutes before reading him his Miranda Rights and taking him into custody.
As the pretrial hearing heads into its fourth day on Friday, some big news was made by the judge.
He announced that he will be allowing some of the evidence, seen so far only inside the courtroom, to be released to the public.
The exact details of what would be released, and if it would include body cam footage, is not immediately clear, but we expect those materials to be released shortly.
Both sides are due back in the courtroom at 9:30 a.m. Friday.