Police Hunt for Gunman After UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Is Killed in Midtown Manhattan

And they captured video of the gunman, who was dressed in black and wearing a gray backpack, crossing the street and walking up to Mr. Thompson. He appeared calm as he raised a gun, fired several times and then walked away.

The seconds before Wednesday morning’s shooting of Mr. Thompson, the fatal moments and the immediate aftermath were all captured on surveillance cameras, leaving investigators with a trail of digital evidence to help search for a man who was “proficient” with firearms, according to Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Police Department, with help from the federal government, poured resources into expanding its surveillance capabilities. New York City now has a vast system of cameras, both public and private, that the police can scour to locate people.

The city has “investigatory capabilities that are above and beyond most municipalities,” said Brittney Blair, a senior director in the investigations and disputes practice at K2 Integrity, which advises companies on risk management and security.

On Wednesday, cameras inside a Starbucks two blocks from the crime scene that the gunman visited minutes before the shooting captured his partially hidden face.

Others showed the gunman waiting for Mr. Thompson, and then recorded him fleeing on a bicycle into Central Park, where he disappeared.

By late Wednesday, the police had released at least five images of the suspect, but had not announced arrests. They had not identified the shooter or a motive.

Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said the police would use its aviation unit, dogs and drones to find the killer.

Investigators would work backward to create a timeline, talking to Mr. Thompson’s friends, colleagues and family, scrutinizing his social media accounts and analyzing surveillance footage around Midtown, the police said.

“An incident like this happens, we don’t spare any expense,” Chief Maddrey said.

The footage revealed a chilling encounter between the seemingly calm gunman and an unsuspecting executive from Minnesota.

The gunman raised the weapon, heedless of a woman standing nearby on the sidewalk. He fired several times, hitting Mr. Thompson in the calf and back, as the woman ran away, according to the footage.

Mr. Thompson barely had time to whirl and face his attacker before crumpling to the ground. The gunman fiddled with his weapon, which had appeared to jam, and shot again as he walked toward Mr. Thompson.

As Mr. Thompson lay bleeding, the gunman jogged across 54th Street and fled through a pedestrian passageway near the Ziegfeld Ballroom before appearing again on West 55th Street. The police would later find a cellphone in that passage.

Then, he got on a bike that he rode north, Chief Kenny said. At 6:48 a.m., at the same time that the police found Mr. Thompson dying on the sidewalk, the shooter was riding into Central Park on Center Drive. That was the last time he was seen, the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said.

Later Wednesday, police officers gathered at a Citi Bike kiosk at Madison Avenue and 82nd Street on the Upper East Side. They were asking doormen and building superintendents nearby for video footage that might have captured activity around the dock.

Despite the ubiquity of cameras across the five boroughs, seemingly tracking New Yorkers’ every move, the police have not always been able to harness their collective power to find suspects quickly.

In April 2022, after Frank James opened fire on a packed Brooklyn subway train during midweek rush hour, it took more than 31 hours for officers to track him down even though he had been captured on surveillance video.

Members of the public eventually tipped the police off to his whereabouts: A 17-year-old boy on a school field trip in Chinatown spotted Mr. James in a park, and then a different caller told investigators that he was at a McDonald’s in the East Village. Mr. James was eventually arrested near Sixth Street and First Avenue.

“It’s never as speedy as you would want it to be or like they show on TV,” said Ms. Blair of K2 Integrity.

“Those investigations are extremely tedious,” said Ms. Blair, who is a former director of intelligence operations at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Chicago. “It takes analysis of tens of thousands of hours of footage from all different camera sources.”

Even with New York’s level of technology and surveillance, the police must rely on investigators who are keen observers and can identify someone by looking at their shape and movements, Ms. Blair said. And the public remains a critical ally of the police, who distribute images and descriptions of suspects in the hope that someone will help identify them, she said.

“There is no magic button you can press to immediately identify someone like this,” Ms. Blair said.

“But,” she added, “of all the places in this country to commit a crime like this, Manhattan would be the dead last location on my list.”

Claire Fahy, Corey Kilgannon and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.

“Many of my colleagues today are sitting down with their executive protection team leaders, their security leadership teams, and re-evaluating what they are doing and not doing,” he said.

Mr. Komendat declined to name any of the companies that participated. But he outlined common practices in the field of corporate security.

He said that security officers use open source information and routinely scour the internet to check references for their executives and see how their company is being discussed in online forums, Mr. Komendat said.

Some companies provide physical protection to executives as well, Mr. Komendat said, but “there is no real standard for this.” It was not clear on Wednesday if Mr. Thompson had physical protection from security firms during his stay in New York.

Health care industry executives, like those in the insurance and defense industries, face increased risks “because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with some of those services,” Mr. Komendat said.

The tree lighting, whose origin dates to the 1930s, is a signature holiday event that is typically patrolled by a large contingent of police officers. Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department for the N.Y.P.D., said there would be a “massive police presence” for the event on Wednesday, including aviation and canine units.

More than 50,000 multicolor LED lights will illuminate a 74-foot-tall tree weighing 11 tons, which was taken into Manhattan from Massachusetts last month, and performers are to include Kelly Clarkson, the Backstreet Boys, Thalia and the Radio City Rockettes.

New York City Tourism + Conventions, which promotes tourism in the city, said that about 30 percent of the city’s annual visitors arrive between October and December, and that the shooting was not expected to alter the numbers. A spokeswoman, Tiffany Townsend, said in an email that the city expected about 7.5 million travelers this holiday season, up from about seven million in 2023, and was on track to meet its current forecast of 64.8 million visitors in 2024.

Ceylan Yeğinsu contributed reporting.

Combined with the user’s phone data and location shared with cell towers, “It is amazing how much information is conveyed,” Mr. Shmoys said.

Jordan Levine, a spokesman for Lyft, declined to describe what data the company has retrieved or shared with the New York Police Department. “We stand ready to assist law enforcement with this investigation,” Mr. Levine said in an email.

Every Citi Bike user must use a credit card to create an account, and the IP address used to do so is recorded, said Brian Muller, a regular Citi Bike user who participates in a program to redistribute bikes where they’re needed around the city. The credit card could be stolen and the IP address masked to hide the person’s identity, said Mr. Muller, who works as an information technology engineer.

“If the perpetrator was smart, they would have a throwaway Lyft account not associated with their personal accounts,” Mr. Muller said.

Electric Citi Bikes are limited to a speed of up to 18 miles an hour. Because they are slow compared with other kinds of electric bikes, because it takes so much time to rent a Citi Bike, and because so much data is generated every time such a bike is unlocked, Mr. Shmoys said that he was surprised that a gunman in such a high-profile crime would choose to use a Citi Bike at all.

Perhaps the only advantage to using a Citi Bike was timing. The shooting occurred in Midtown Manhattan at 6:44 a.m., when commuters are typically riding thousands of Citi Bikes to office buildings in the area.

“It’s a time of day when there’s a lot of bikes in Midtown,” Mr. Shmoys said. “Those stations are full.”

And early on Wednesday morning, it became the backdrop for a high-profile killing, when a man gunned down Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, near an entrance, before fleeing on a bicycle.

“Someone got shot outside,” an attendee of a conference was overheard saying on his way upstairs, where people were chatting over cups of coffee before the day’s events began. It seemed like just another day of business-minded mingling in New York.

That someone would turn out to be Mr. Thompson, a head of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, and one of the scheduled speakers at the event, the UnitedHealth Group’s Investor Conference 2024. As attendees gathered, news crews were massing on the street below, the police were searching for the hooded shooter, and, at Mount Sinai West, a hospital just uptown, Mr. Thompson, 50, was dead after sustaining gunshot wounds.

As the news spread, the conference was called off, attendees pulled off their lanyards and headed for the exits, carry-on luggage in tow.

Mark Sanders, the general manager of the New York Hilton Midtown, said in an email that the hotel staff was shaken by the crime. “We are deeply saddened by this morning’s events in the area and our thoughts are with all affected by the tragedy,” he said.

But at the hotel, by necessity, life paused, then went on. A hotel is meant to be calm — this one in particular perhaps, serving if not as an oasis, then a carpeted pocket of quiet against the volume of Midtown, with its coffee carts and taxi cabs, its sidewalks jammed with tourists and men and women walking, head down, in suits. The hotel staff, in its heavily trafficked lobby, projects an aura of having seen it all, and having looked away.

Though yellow police tape closed off a section of West 54th Street just outside a side entrance, hotel guests continued traipsing in and out of the main entrance on Wednesday morning. Natasha Reyes, a cashier at the gift shop, said that she had arrived about an hour before the shooting, and never heard anything at all.

This is probably how it was when other major events were happening around the hotel. When, for example, Mr. Presley, in a baby-blue suit, was giving an interview in a ballroom. Or when Neil Sheehan and his colleagues from The New York Times booked several rooms to compile the story on the leaked government report that would roil the nation with its revelations about the Vietnam War. Or when an engineer from Motorola placed the first call ever made from a handheld cellular phone from the sidewalk outside.

Hotels are meant to absorb whatever happens. If there is conflict or even tragedy, they are just the backdrop.

Wednesday’s victim, Brian Thompson, headed a different subsidiary of United Healthcare Group, the parent company, and there was no indication that the hack was linked to what appeared to be a targeted killing. But clearly it will be part of the investigation, because the scope and scale of the hack infuriated patients whose data was revealed, health care groups that couldn’t get paid and the hackers themselves, who came under intense investigation.

In May the chief executive of United Healthcare, Andrew Witty, came under bipartisan criticism for how the company handled the attack. He acknowledged that lax security had enabled the hackers to enter Change Healthcare’s systems, and that United had failed to cover payments for providers in the months after the hack.

The company has said relatively little about the damage, and Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said the “hack is a dire warning about the consequences of ‘too-big-to-fail’ mega corporations gobbling up larger and larger shares of the health care system.”

The attack was part of a larger pattern of ransomware cases, many originating in Russia, that have struck hospitals, insurers and cities across the United States.

Mr. Thompson’s killing on Wednesday outside a midtown Manhattan hotel as he was walking toward the UnitedHealth Group’s annual investor day sent shock waves through the nation’s vast health care sector. The fatal shooting elicited an outpouring of sympathy from rival insurers, executives, health care providers and others.

During Mr. Thompson’s tenure as chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, the company’s profits rose, with earnings from operations topping $16 billion in 2023 from $12 billion in 2021. Mr. Thompson received a total compensation package last year of $10.2 million, a combination of $1 million in base pay and cash and stock grants.

He oversaw significant growth in one of the company’s key businesses, the sale of private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage, a program mainly for those 65 and older that receives federal funds and now covers roughly half of the 61 million people signing up.

“He sure as heck had a lot of role in the proliferation of Medicare Advantage,” said Matt Burns, a former United executive who spent several years working for Mr. Thompson, whom colleagues knew as BT.

Mr. Thompson grew up in Jewell, Iowa, where his father, the late Dennis Thompson, worked for decades as a grain elevator operator. From a modest background, Mr. Thompson had achieved executive status but remained open and approachable, Mr. Burns said. When asked to develop a long-term plan for the company, he solicited input from top executives and then synthesized their views. “That speaks to how inherently sharp he was and how well he knew the business,” Mr. Burns said.

Steve Nelson, the president of Aetna and a former chief executive at UnitedHealthcare, worked with Mr. Thompson for close to a decade. “He actually was the smartest guy in the room, without being annoying,” Mr. Nelson said of his former colleague, who described his self-deprecating sense of humor. “He would make fun of himself a lot,” Mr. Nelson said, who said Mr. Thompson was an amateur wrestler who liked to challenge colleagues to arm wrestling.

He was also well-regarded by Wall Street analysts, where he was known for his reassuring descriptions of the company’s outlook.

On a recent call with Wall Street analysts and investors to discuss the company’s financial results, Mr. Thompson provided a confident voice when questioned. When asked about the employer segment, he told one analyst, “I feel really good about not only our performance, but our cost management inside our commercial business.”

Mr. Thompson had presided over the division as it faced multiple inquiries and has been criticized by congressional lawmakers and federal regulators who accused it of systematically denying authorization for health care procedures and treatments.

The insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group has also been under federal scrutiny because the parent company was the victim of a broad cyberattack on its billing and payment system, Change Healthcare. Private information, including health data, from more than 100 million Americans was compromised in the ransomware attack. The parent company paid $22 million in ransom in an effort to stop the hackers.

UnitedHealth Group has a sprawling dominance over nearly every segment of health care, and it is one of the nation’s largest companies overall, with $372 billion in revenue last year. But its massive size and scope have attracted the attention of the Justice Department, which is looking into whether the company has engaged in any anti-competitive behavior. The company’s proposed acquisition of a major home care company recently resulted in a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department and four state attorneys general seeking to block the deal.

In addition, Bloomberg News reported that several of UnitedHealth Group’s executives sold stock. According to regulatory filings, Mr. Thompson owned about $20 million of shares in the parent company as of late September. In April, Bloomberg reported that he was one of at least four executives at the company who had sold shares before the Justice Department antitrust investigation was disclosed to the company’s investors — about $15 million worth in Mr. Thompson’s case. The company told Bloomberg at the time that the sales had been approved.

After Mr. Thompson joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004, he rose steadily, taking on various finance roles and eventually overseeing the company’s government plans offered to people who qualify for Medicare or Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor. United’s management of those plans has also been scrutinized by the federal government.

Those who worked with him during that time said he was responsive to concerns about how to serve the individuals in those programs. “Every interaction with him felt extremely genuine,” said Antonio Ciaccia, a consultant who discussed using pharmacists to help provide better care for people receiving Medicaid. “He was a very good listener.”

Before he went to work at United, Mr. Thompson spent nearly seven years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, also known as PwC, the large accounting firm. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an accounting major in May 1997.

A number of the insurer’s rivals and analysts said they were shocked by the news of his killing, and praised his management style.

“It’s a very dark day for all of health care,” said Michael Ha, an analyst at Baird who was at the investor conference on Wednesday. “He was so smart, talented leader, very well-respected, with such a bright future as a health care leader.”

Gail Boudreaux, the chief executive of Elevance Health, said that overseeing health care organizations “is marked by dedication, compassion and a profound commitment to improving lives, and Brian embodied these qualities and more.’’

“I knew him to be a visionary leader who developed innovative ideas to take on some of the nation’s greatest challenges,” said Kim Keck, the chief executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which represents Blue Cross plans. “His death is a great loss for our country and for the health care industry.”

Mr. Nelson of Aetna said he would not speculate about any motive for Mr. Thompson’s murder, but he noted that insurance executives are sometimes the target of people’s frustrations with the health care system.

“I’m not going to say that it comes with the territory, because that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Nobody should ever feel their life is threatened for doing their job.”

In a video sent to UnitedHealth employees, Andrew Witty, the parent company’s chief executive, said: “Brian was a truly extraordinary person who touched the lives of countless people throughout our organization and far beyond. It’s a terrible tragedy.” The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the video message.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the company said it was working closely with the New York Police Department. “Our hearts go out to Brian’s family and all who were close to him,” the company said.

Mr. Thompson lived with his family in a suburb of Minneapolis. He is survived by his wife, Paulette R. Thompson, a physical therapist who works for a Minnesota health system, and two children.

Joe Rennison, Stefanos Chen, Julie Creswell and Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting.