A national security analyst identified a "gap in the law" that should shield the family of alleged assassin Luigi Mangione from potential legal consequences.
The mother of the 26-year-old suspect in the fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson filed a missing person report for her son last month, several months after he suddenly and inexplicably ended contact with family and friends, and CNN's Juliette Kayyem said that gap may hold clues about the killing.
"There was a definite break with with his past six months ago, family and friends we saw were trying to reach out to him," Kayyem said. "You saw on social media that friends were saying, you know, 'Hey, where are you?' That break may have come because of the surgery or some other issue that will probably be explained in his defense, and he is clearly a different person to them."
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Kayyem said relatives must have recognized Mangione in photos circulated by law enforcement during the manhunt, but she said they may have had no legal obligation to identify him to police.
"There's no – the family never came forward, and I don't want to guess why not, but, you know, it is worth raising that those pictures," Kayyem said. "Let me put it a different way: If you were the parent of the person in those pictures, you would know that that was your son. There were enough pictures by the end of the week, any of us who's a parent are able to pick out our kid. They did not come forward. They were clearly desperate to find him with the mother, you know, looking for missing, filing a missing persons report."
"There's no legal duty to rat out your son – there just isn't," Kayyem added. "Unless they actually knew that he had committed the crime or could stop him from a future crime, there's no legal obligation to see something and then say something. It's a gap in the law, but, as anyone could guess, it's probably quite complicated morally, as well, for that family, and we'll learn more about what the family was doing this week. It seems hard to believe that someone in the family did not know that that was him."
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