A high-profile violent crime typically sets social media abuzz with tips and theories from amateur internet sleuths, hunting for the alleged perpetrator.
But after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York City this week without a primary suspect being identified, a rare occurrence happened in the thriving true-crime world: silence online from highly followed armchair detectives.
“I have yet to see a single video that’s pounding the drum of ‘we have to find him,’ and that is unique,” said Michael McWhorter, better known as TizzyEnt on TikTok, where he posts true crime and viral news content for his 6.7 million followers. “And in other situations of some kind of blatant violence, I would absolutely be seeing that.”
A masked gunman, who is still on the lam, fatally shot the 50-year-old executive in front of a busy New York City hotel Wednesday, police said. A senior New York City law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said Thursday that shell casings found at the scene had the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on them but police clarified Friday that it was “delay” and not “defend.”
Thompson’s targeted killing has sparked online praise from people angry over the state of U.S. health care. Tens of thousands of people have expressed support on social media for the killing or sympathized with it. Some even appeared to celebrate it.
“The surge of social media posts praising and glorifying the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson is deeply concerning,” Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser at The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University previously told NBC News. (Thompson was CEO of UnitedHealthcare, not of UnitedHealth Group, its parent company.)
In a statement, Thompson’s family said he was “an incredibly loving father” to two sons and “will be greatly missed.”
“We are shattered to hear about the senseless killing of our beloved Brian,” the statement said. “Brian was an incredibly loving, generous, talented man who truly lived life to the fullest and touched so many lives.”
Still, some of the most popular internet sleuths have sat out the investigation.
“We’re pretty apathetic towards that,” Savannah Sparks, who has 1.3 million followers on her TikTok account — where she tracks down and reveals the identities of people who do racist or seemingly criminal acts in viral videos — said about helping to identify the shooter. She added that, rather than sleuthing, her community has “concepts of thoughts and prayers. It’s, you know, claim denied on my prayers there,” referring to rote and unserious condolences.
Although Sparks, 34, has been tapped by law enforcement in the past to help train officers on how to find suspects online, according to emails seen by NBC News, she said this time she isn’t interested in helping police.
Sparks, who also works in health care as a lactation consultant and holds a doctorate of pharmacy, didn’t mince words when asked if her community was working to find the suspect in Thompson’s murder.
“Absolutely the f--- not,” she said.
Another popular TikTok sleuth, thatdaneshguy, who has 2 million followers on the platform, made a video that was critical of the health care industry, saying that he wouldn’t try to identify the killer. “I don’t have to encourage violence. I don’t have to condone violence by any means. But I also don’t have to help,” he said.
That attitude among some content creators comes amid amplified attention on frustrations with medical care in the U.S. in the wake of the killing.
A Gallup poll released Friday found that Americans believe health care quality is at a 24-year low. Those polled said health care coverage is even worse, with 54% saying it’s fair or poor.
Online sleuths have helped the FBI identify hundreds of Capitol rioters and catch previously arrested Jan. 6 defendants committing crimes that the bureau’s own review had missed, in one case even finding evidence of a Proud Boy assaulting an officer in the middle of his seditious conspiracy trial.
And when Gabby Petito, 22, went missing as she documented her cross-country travels on social media with her fiancé, online sleuths jumped into action. It was later determined that Petito was killed by her fiancé Brian Laundrie, who died by suicide.
At least one person who did try to help find Thompson’s killer was criticized on X, formerly known as Twitter, for doing so.
In a viral post, Riley Walz, a software engineer, said he was “fairly confident” about where the shooter fled to on a bike after scouring data from the Citi Bike’s bikeshare program. He said he shared the information with the police.
But a source close to Lyft, which operates Citi Bike, later said the NYPD told the company directly that the incident did not involve the bikeshare program.
Walz declined to comment Friday. Since his post, some X users have called him a “snitch.” McWhorter, or TikTok’s TizzyEnt, said backlash toward those who did try to help might cause others to not want to step in.
“If you’re seeing it in such a groundswell, I have to imagine that factors into some people’s decision,” he said.
But mostly, McWhorter said, “there’s this weird thing, this vibe of like, I don’t see a bunch of people just feeling an urgency.”
McWhorter posted his first video about the incident Friday evening. The roughly two-minute video was about “how much people don’t care.”
Sukrit Venkatagiri, an assistant professor of computer science at Swarthmore College, said many people feel a lack of connection with a wealthy CEO.
“They don’t really empathize with who the victim is in this scenario,” Venkatagiri said.
Venkatagiri, who has studied the harms of misinformation and disinformation as well as crowd sourcing investigations, said, anecdotally, he has seen less talk of finding Thompson’s killer on spaces like the subreddit r/Reddit Bureau of Investigations, an online sleuthing page on Reddit that claims it is “using the power of the internet to solve real-world problems.”
“People are less motivated, from an altruistic perspective, to help this victim in this specific case,” Venkatagiri said.
Beyond a lack of online sleuthing, which can sometimes muddy law enforcement’s investigations, there has been a flurry of information released by the New York Police Department.
Police released two images of a “person of interest,” including one in which he is smiling while using a fake ID to check out of a hostel on New York City’s Upper West Side, as well as several surveillance videos, including one in which the suspect shoots Thompson.
Investigators believe the shooter may have traveled to New York City from Atlanta last month by bus, three senior law enforcement officials familiar with the case told NBC News.
Investigators have not identified a suspect, although the investigation is ongoing, a senior law enforcement official briefed on the matter said Friday. Police have found dozens of images from surveillance cameras of the suspect from tracking his timeline in Manhattan, the official said.
Police have offered a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
