The masked gunman who stalked and killed the leader of one of the largest U.S. health insurance companies on a Manhattan sidewalk used ammunition emblazoned with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose,” a law enforcement official said Thursday.
The official was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, died in a dawn ambush Wednesday as he walked to the company’s annual investor conference at a Hilton hotel in Midtown, blocks from tourist draws like Radio City Music Hall and the Museum of Modern Art.
The words on the ammunition may have been a reference to strategies insurance companies use to try to avoid paying claims.
Amnesty International accused Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip during its war with Hamas, saying it has sought to deliberately destroy Palestinians by mounting deadly attacks, demolishing vital infrastructure and preventing the delivery of food, medicine and other aid.
The human rights group released a report Thursday in the Middle East that said such actions could not be justified by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack into Israel, which ignited the war, or the presence of militants in civilian areas. Amnesty said the United States and other allies of Israel could be complicit in genocide, and called on them to halt arms shipments.
“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said in the report.
As an undergraduate student at St. Thomas, Julian Ocampo faced a dilemma familiar to many students, past and present: a lack of quality Mexican food near campus.
“There (were) no restaurants here; I remember everybody was struggling,” Ocampo said. “Everybody went to Chipotle, way down there, but then people had to pack into cars because only one person had a car and all that.”
Now, six years after he graduated from the Opus College of Business in 2018, Ocampo is providing students and community members with exactly what he lacked with a newly-opened Los Ocampo restaurant at the intersection of Marshall and Cretin avenues, two blocks from the university.
Ocampo co-owns the restaurant, now the third of its kind, with his parents, Armando Ocampo and Lili Sagal, who are majority owners, having opened the first Los Ocampo in 2003. Julian said he became more closely involved with the business while studying at St. Thomas; he opened his first restaurant for the chain when he was a junior.
He also plans to integrate students’ dining dollars as an accepted form of payment, an idea Julian said came about when he met Patricia Conde-Brooks, St. Thomas’ executive director of student engagement, at a university-hosted Hispanic job fair last year. While the service is not yet operational, he said that incorporating the St. Thomas system came hand-in-hand with the company’s recent streamlining of other points of service like Uber Eats and DoorDash.
“It was just another thing to integrate with,” Julian said. “At this point, all the POSes, if they want to be competitive, they have to be able to do that. If not, they’re going to get left behind.”
Giovanni Mariani can be reached at mari6061@stthomas.edu.