News

Yeah I agree, I'm not even convinced it is Luigi. The killer deliberately dressed in a way that hundreds of people in NY are dressed as at any given time. I'm skeptical of the trail they've pieced together from video camera footage. It's unlikely they have continuous shots of him going from one side of the city to the other.

And the thing is, I'm extremely skeptical of anything the NYPD says. They just recently had a case thrown out when they were caught on camera planting evidence. How many times do you have to plant evidence before you get caught on camera doing it?

I don't know if Luigi did it or not. But if he didn't do it, here's one plausible scenario for how he didn't do it that would still account for all the evidence we've seen publicly:

He's reportedly bisexual and from a wealthy and likely conservative family. And he hadn't talked to his family in months; they were actively looking for him. He got some severe back injury, and maybe he decides to just get away from unaccepting and overbearing family, perhaps for awhile, perhaps permanently. He wants to get away and find himself, just walk the Earth for awhile. So he's been living out of various hostels and homeless shelters for awhile in various cities. To keep his family from tracking him down, he gets a fake ID and travels under an assumed name. He wears a hoodie and mask almost everywhere, as he doesn't want his family to track him down. And he is genuinely worried about covid living in a hostel.

He's staying in NYC. A few days after the shooting, to his horror, he sees his own picture on the news listed as the killer. He freaks out and flees the city. He eventually gets picked up by the cops in Pennsylvania.

Unbeknownst to him, he was struck with the combination of terrible luck and a corrupt police department. Luigi happened to be dressed like the killer, and he happened to be near the scene of the crime within a few hours of the killing. A camera catches him placing a wrapper or bottle in a trash can. And his DNA is on it. The cops falsely conclude the killer is the one that put the wrapper in the trash, and they now are certain they have the DNA of the killer. (Another possibility is that the actual killer stood by a public trash can and waited until someone dressed like him happened to drop a wrapper in the trash, and then deliberately planted it near the scene.) They do some detective work, and find that Luigi has been living in an assumed name with a fake ID in a hostel.

So the cops are 90% certain they have the guy. They have a guy that vaguely looks like the killer, is using a fake ID, and whose DNA was found near the scene. In their minds, that's an airtight case, and they convince themselves that this makes it OK to fake further evidence to seal the deal. When they arrest Luigi, they plant the untraceable gun on him along with that manifesto, that was conveniently had written, and not published electronically like you would expect a software engineer to do.

And moreover, if the cops were going to just pick a convenient scapegoat, who better than Luigi? He's a young kid, estranged from his family, living in hostels and homeless shelters. He was basically living as a drifter. That's the exact kind of low social status person that cops would be tempted to foist something like this on.

I can't prove any of this obviously. But the one thing that sticks with me is Luigi's only public statement. He hasn't issued any public statement. But there was that one time, before he started working with his lawyer, where he shouted to the crowd of reporters. He didn't shout, "this was for the the innocent victims of Brian Thompson!" Or "I apologize for nothing!" Or some other statement that you would expect a proud martyr for a cause to make. Instead, he shouted, "this is an insult to the intelligence of the American people!"

That's the kind of thing an innocent man would shout. That's the kind of thing one would shout if you had just been framed by the NYPD. That is the cry of a young man who knows he is being framed and faces literal execution for a crime he didn't commit. I would be enraged too.

And again, this isn't outlandish, the NYPD has been caught faking evidence many times before. If they already had a decently strong case due to the DNA at the scene, I could absolutely see them trying to wrap it up quickly by planting the gun and manifesto on him.

People like to share these "Saint Luigi" memes. But if he actually is innocent, literally not the man who pulled the trigger? If he were to be still convicted, executed, and later the truth come to light? He would be a completely innocent martyr. That's the kind of thing that actually could get some one canonized as literal official Saint of the Catholic Church.

I of course can't prove any of this, and it is possible that Luigi really did do it. Cameras and lighting can make people look very different. Or maybe the cops have a lot stronger evidence that they just haven't released yet. But this is the kind of theory of the case I could see the defense making. And ultimately, they don't have to prove Luigi didn't do it. They just have to show reasonable doubt. And based on the entirely circumstantial evidence we have, combined with the NYPD's predilection for fabricating evidence, at least right now with the publicly available evidence, I think reasonable doubt absolutely exists.