CBS News
UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting considered targeted attack, police say
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
CBS News
Search for murder weapon in UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting continues. Here’s what police have found so far.
NEW YORK — The manhunt in UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder continues to expand.
Police have been searching Central Park for clues, both on land and in water, as U.S. Marshals work to figure out where the person of interest boarded a bus to New York City.
Central Park dive teams looking for murder weapon
NYPD dive teams were seen near Central Park’s iconic Bethesda Fountain all weekend, searching for the murder weapon.
Police say the weapon is critical, because detectives can potentially find out where it was purchased and who owned it.
For now, police say the lack of concrete evidence is why they are referring to the man seen in surveillance images as a “person of interest.”
On Friday, police discovered a backpack they believe belonged to that man. They said a jacket was found inside, but sources tell CBS News it was not the one worn during the shooting. Fake Monopoly money was also found inside, but no gun.
Search expands to Greyhound bus stations
Police sources say the search has expanded to Greyhound bus stations between New York and Atlanta, as they work to figure out where the man boarded a bus that brought him to the city.
The latest photos from the NYPD show the person of interest with his mask on in the back of a taxi. But the most telling photo yet is one where he briefly lowered his mask to talk to an employee at the Upper West Side hostel where he had been staying.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams sounds optimistic an arrest will be made soon, adding police have a name and are “tightening the net.”
The FBI is putting out posters, referring to the man as a suspect, and promising a $50,000 reward. They say he was last seen at the Port Authority bus terminal in Washington Heights 45 minutes after Thompson was killed.
CBS News
Mob hangs and kills 3 men accused of kidnapping girl in Mexico
Three men accused of kidnapping and robbing a girl were lynched by a crowd in central Mexico on Saturday, local authorities said.
Lynchings have increased in Mexico in recent years, with experts saying the perception of impunity leads communities to take justice into their own hands.
The trio were killed on Saturday afternoon in San Juan Amecac, 42 miles southeast of the capital Mexico City, a local government statement said.
“Three men died after being detained and lynched by residents for the alleged robbery and kidnapping of a minor,” it said.
Police rushed to the scene but the men “no longer showed vital signs” by the time they arrived, it added.
Some 300 people participated in the lynching — hanging and beating the men until they were dead, according to local media.
The uptick in vigilantism is taking place amidst a broader increase in violence in Mexico since 2006, fueled by drug trafficking.
In June, four men were lynched and then burned in the nearby city of Atlixco by a crowd that accused them of stealing a vehicle.
In March, residents of the southern city of Taxco lynched a woman they accused of murdering an eight-year-old girl. Two men also suspected by locals of involvement were attacked but survived, the BBC reported.
In 2022, a mob in Mexico attacked a young political adviser and then set him on fire over child trafficking accusations shared on chat groups.
In 2018, two men were burned to death in Puebla after rumors spread on WhatsApp that they were child abductors, BBC News reported. The rumors turned out to be untrue.
CBS News
184 killed in Haiti, U.N. says, as gang leader allegedly orders massacre of elderly on voodoo priest’s advice
The United Nations human rights chief said Monday that 184 people were killed over the weekend in the Haitian capital, as Port-au-Prince was rocked by a spike in gang violence that pushed the death toll from Haiti’s spiraling security crisis to at least 5,000.
“Just this past weekend, at least 184 people were killed in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, in the Cite Soleil area,” Volker Turk told reporters in Geneva. “These latest killings bring the death toll just this year in Haiti to a staggering 5,000 people.”
Volker appeared to be referring to a reported massacre carried out by a gang leader in the impoverished Cite Soleil neighborhood who targeted elderly people he suspected of sickening his own child by witchcraft.
The Reuters news agency quoted the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH) as saying on Sunday that Monel “Mikano” Felix, leader of the Wharf Jeremie gang, had ordered the murders in Cite Soleil, and that all the victims of the attack were over 60 years old.
RNDDH said Felix had sought advice from a voodoo priest who told him elderly people in the area had harmed his child, who died on Saturday, leading to members of his gang killing at least 100 people Friday and Saturday with machetes and knives.
Cite Soleil is a densely populated neighborhood near the port in Port-au-Prince. It’s among the most impoverished and violent areas in the small country.
Haiti has been gripped by political chaos for years, leaving room for heavily-armed criminal gangs to seize huge swaths of territory in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere. Much of the capital remains lawless despite hundreds of police from Kenya being sent in to help reassert law and order.
International airlines have largely stopped flying in and out of Haiti amid the chaos and bloodshed, with several U.S. carriers halting flights entirely after planes were hit by gunfire in November. American Airlines said over the weekend that it no longer planned to resume flights from February as previously stated, joining Spirit Airlines and JetBlue Airways in postponing all Haiti routes indefinitely.