By Tyler L. Jakson | Dec 07, 2024 Updated 07:00 a.m. ET
The police on Friday offered a nearly minute-by-minute timeline of a gunman’s movements before and after he fatally shot Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, in Midtown Manhattan two days earlier.
The police have made no arrests in the shooting, and do not have a name for a suspect, but investigators have begun to piece together the movements of a man they believe killed Mr. Thompson on a city sidewalk early Wednesday morning.
Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said at a news briefing on Friday that the suspect arrived in the city at 10:11 p.m. on Nov. 24 on a bus that originated out of Atlanta. Detectives have looked at the route the bus took and plan to reach out to the police department of each of the six or seven towns the bus stopped in, he said.
Upon arrival in New York, the man took a cab to the New York Hilton Midtown — where he would later fatally shoot Mr. Thompson — and spent about half an hour walking in the area of the hotel before checking in to a hostel on the Upper West Side, the chief said.
At the hostel, he stayed under fake identification, always using cash, avoiding conversation and hiding his face with his mask even during meals, the chief said. He never spoke with anyone and lowered his mask once to speak, smiling, to the hostel clerk when he first checked in, the chief said.
On Wednesday, the day of the shooting, the gunman left the hostel at 5:30 a.m. and likely rode a bicycle toward Midtown, Chief Kenny said. Though investigators do not have video of him taking the bike to the scene of the shooting, they are speculating that he did because it took him only 10 minutes to get from the hostel on 103rd Street to West 54th Street. The police are “still looking into” the possibility that he could have stolen the bike, he said.
At 5:41 a.m., he arrived at the Hilton and began wandering the area near the hotel, walking back and forth on West 54th Street, before entering a Starbucks, where he bought a bottle of water and a snack bar.
He fatally shot Mr. Thompson at 6:44 a.m. He then got back on the bike and made it into Central Park four minutes later. He left the park at 6:56 a.m., still on the bicycle.
Surveillance cameras captured footage of him, still on the bicycle, two minutes later at 86th Street and Columbus Avenue. By 7 a.m. he was still on 86th street, but no longer on the bicycle. He then took a cab northbound, to a bus station near the George Washington Bridge that is used by interstate buses.
By 7:30 a.m. he had made it to the station, where video surveillance showed him going in but not coming out, Chief Kenny said.
The police have not been able to find the bicycle, he said. But officers had found a backpack they believed to be the one worn by the gunman, after more than 100 officers searched a wooded area, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the development.
The police are investigating every “single tip” that is coming into the Crime Stoppers bureau, Kenny said. “As weird as some of them are, as detailed as some of them are,” he said, “we will vet and investigate every tip that comes in.”
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