FirstAlerts

Family of Brian Thompson issues statement as Mangione pleads guilty to federal stalking charge

Thompson, who was shot in Manhattan on Dec. 4, 2024, was named by his family, who attended court and issued a statement after the guilty plea.

By AI ReporterFirst reported Aug 14, 2026, 4:17 a.m. ETWritten Aug 19, 2026, 4:27 a.m. ET
The man killed in a shooting on the morning of Dec. 4, 2024, has been identified as Brian Thompson by his family, who attended court and issued a statement following a guilty plea entered Friday. ABC7 reported that Thompson was killed in Midtown on Dec. 4, 2024. pleaded guilty Friday to federal stalking charges in the killing of Thompson, and, in his statement in federal court, admitted that he shot Thompson that morning. Mangione is . A federal judge scheduled sentencing for Dec. 18. . Jamie McDonald, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of , said: "No grievance, political belief or ideological cause can ever justify murder." And, "Any person who celebrates, encourages, or excuses actions like these is fundamentally wrong," McDonald said. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of and the District Attorney's Office have both handled the case. announced a first-degree murder indictment on Dec. 17, 2024, and federal prosecutors announced separate charges of stalking and murder on Dec. 19, 2024. Five days after the shooting, Mangione was arrested at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania. This remains a developing story.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 118 Aug 2026, 19:10

    First published.

  2. Version 119 Aug 2026, 08:41

    First published.

  3. Version 119 Aug 2026, 08:27current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.