Suspect charged with murder said in handwritten note: ‘Those parasites had it coming.’

Despite all the modern wizardry available to law enforcement today, it was a simple, traditional image that was disseminated to the media and public and led to the arrest of Luigi Mangione.

Police released an image from surveillance footage on Dec. 5 showing a then-unidentified person of interest. On Monday, a McDonald’s employee recognized him and called the police.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI, told NBC’s “TODAY” this morning: “I’m a big fan of crowd-sourcing crime solving. I remember long ago in my FBI career we debated this decision to share information with the public.

“Stop worrying, get it out there – that’s what made this case fail, the CCTV,” he said.

“There’s an interesting contrast with our high-tech forensics and our sophisticated DNA, fingerprints, dive teams and what solved that? I just posted a photo of the guy,” he added.

Luigi Mangione, who was charged in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last night, wrote in a handwritten note he left that “these parasites had it,” a senior law enforcement official told NBC News.

This line comes from three pages of notes seized by police after his arrest yesterday morning in Pennsylvania.

The notes also referenced the health care industry, stated he acted alone and included the sentence: “I apologize for any disruption and trauma, but it had to be done,” the official said.

One of the officers who arrested Luigi Mangione has only been in office for six months. Patrolman Tyler Frye and his partner immediately recognized Mangione as the man in the photos distributed after Thompson’s murder.