Unabomber’s brother Ted Kaczynski says it was a “terrible mistake” if Luigi Mangione was influenced by him

The brother of Ted Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist known as the “Unabomber,” said Tuesday he hopes the man charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson doesn’t use his brother as a “key model.” look at, and be saddened by, actions taken decades ago can lead to violence today.

For two decades, Ted Kaczynski carried out a deadly bombing that killed three people and injured 23 others until he was captured in the Montana wilderness in 1996. Kaczynski had mocked officials with a rambling manifesto and was arrested after one of the longest FBI manhunts in history.

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The suspect in Thompson’s murder, Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League tech graduate, reviewed Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future,” also known as “The Unabomber Manifesto,” in January and wrote on the book review site Goodreads: ” It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as a madman’s manifesto to avoid confronting some of the unpleasant problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how many of his predictions about modern society were prescient.

But David Kaczynski said his brother, who died by suicide in federal custody in 2023, should not be someone to aspire to.

“His actions are like a virus,” David Kaczynski said in a telephone interview. “They could be like a virus if they don’t understand that he was a very angry and disturbed man. That doesn’t mean his ideas are the ideas of a madman, but his behavior is, in my opinion, the behavior of a madman.”

“It is a terrible mistake that he even attributed the violence to some kind of normalization or recasting as beneficial to humanity,” David Kaczynski added.

Ted Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated mathematician, railed against the technology in his writings and planted homemade pipe bombs – targeting universities, an American Airlines flight and others – from 1978 to 1995, according to federal prosecutors. He wrote a 35,000-word manifesto against the “industrial-technological system” that he hoped would spark a revolution in modern society.

Mangione, 26, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics, while also earning a master’s degree in computer and information science, the school said.

He was arrested Monday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a days-long manhunt following Thompson’s death last Wednesday. The 50-year-old CEO was shot dead outside a New York hotel in a “premeditated, pre-planned targeted attack,” the NYPD said.

At a hearing Tuesday afternoon in Pennsylvania, Mangione chose to fight extradition to New York, where he would face second-degree murder and other charges. Bail was refused.

Before entering the courthouse, Mangione shouted to reporters: “This is completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience!”

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters Monday that investigators found a handwritten document that “reflects both his motivation and his mindset.” No further details were released, but NYPD Chief Detective Joseph Kenny said Mangione appeared to have “ill will toward corporate America.”

In a preliminary analysis of the shooting by the NYPD, investigators said they were examining whether the attack was the culmination of the suspect’s obvious problems and grievances, including the possibility that the killing was a “symbolic crackdown” in the fight against the “power” of the police Corporations were games.”

Investigators also suggested that he may have admired Kaczynski’s attacks and allegedly expressed his own concerns about technological advances.

According to Mangione’s Goodreads account, he read 65 titles on topics ranging from Elon Musk to diets. He rated Kaczynski’s book four out of five stars. He also cited “a take” he found online that he thought was “interesting.”

The online comment about Kaczynski read, among other things: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is essential to survival. You may not like his methods, but if you look at things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”

David Kaczynski was instrumental in his brother’s capture. After The Washington Post published “The Unabomber Manifesto” in 1995, David Kaczynski realized that his sibling could be one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives and cooperated with the agency in his capture.

David Kaczynski said he understands that people to this day can read his brother’s writings and find a connection to his belief that rapid technological advances are undermining human freedom. But violence, he added, cannot accompany change.

“I think we always have to remember that human motivation is extremely complicated,” said David Kaczynski. “Many factors influence a person’s motivation to act so drastically, and I hope in some way my brother was not a role model for him.”

David Kaczynski declined to comment on his brother’s death in prison in June 2023. Ted Kaczynski was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole and was diagnosed with rectal cancer when he died by suicide at the age of 81, alone in his cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. His autopsy, carried out by NBC News in April, revealed that he had been “depressed and sent for psychiatric evaluation” a month before his suicide.

“Just as acts of love can send ripples of benefit to other people and to all of humanity in ways both visible and invisible to us,” said David Kaczynski, “acts of violence do the same, albeit in some ways.” It pains me “I really do when I think that my brother’s actions contributed in some way to driving a man like this to kill an innocent person.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com