FROM IVY LEAGUE STAR TO COLD BLOODED KILLER?

The young man strode confidently across the stage to the podium.

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Luigi Mangione, the valedictorian of Baltimore’s elite, all-boys Gilman School, went on in his 2016 graduation speech — which is still on YouTube — to praise his class for “challenging the world.” “He was the nicest kid — humble, unassuming and easy to approach,” classmate Freddie Leatherbury says. “The person that I knew eight years ago, and the person that he has allegedly become today, could not be more different.”

Police believe Mangione is the person responsible for gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City street on Dec. 4. After a five-day manhunt, Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pa. “This is completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people,” the 26-year-old angrily shouted at reporters as cops dragged him into a Pennsylvania courtroom the next day. (He pleaded not guilty on gun charges in that state, and at press time, his lawyer said Mangione was planning to do the same to the murder charge in New York.) The arrest, along with an alleged manifesto declaring his murderous intentions, left his loved ones reeling as the country struggled to reconcile the making of a murderer from the kindhearted scion of a wealthy family. “It’s unfathomable,” says his friend RJ Martin. “He had everything going for him.”

PRIVILEGED UPBRINGING