Police find backpack in Central Park, a possible link to gunman who killed CEO

NEW YORK — Investigators said Friday that they had recovered DNA from a water bottle they believed had been discarded by the man who killed a health care executive in a brazen attack in midtown Manhattan this week.

Police also said they had found a backpack they believed the gunman had been wearing, and they continued to sift through a flood of tips from around the country. But they had still made no arrest in the killing of Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old executive who led UnitedHealthcare, one of the United States’ largest health insurance companies. Police said they had reason to believe the gunman left the city soon after the shooting.

The DNA specimen was taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for testing, an agency spokesperson said. The backpack, found in Central Park, was also sent to a lab for forensic analysis.

Police managed to piece together a few other details about the gunman’s movements, mostly from surveillance cameras. At a news briefing, Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said the gunman arrived in the city at 10:11 p.m. Nov. 24 on a bus that originated in Atlanta. It was not clear where he had boarded the bus.

He took a cab to the New York Hilton Midtown and spent about half an hour walking in the area before checking into a hostel on the Upper West Side, the chief said.

He stayed under fake identification at the hostel, always using cash, avoiding conversation and hiding his face with his mask even during meals, the chief said. The gunman never talked with anyone and lowered his mask once to speak, smiling, to the hostel clerk, the chief added.

“We do not have his name,” Kenny said. “At this point, we believe he acted alone.”

The gunman left the hostel at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday and rode a bicycle toward midtown, Kenny said. At 5:41, he arrived at the Hilton and began wandering near the hotel, walking back and forth on West 54th Street, before going into a Starbucks, where he bought a bottle of water and a snack bar.

Thompson was walking into the hotel for an investors day conference around 6:44 a.m. The gunman shot him several times on the sidewalk.

He then got back on the bike and made it into Central Park four minutes later. He left the park at 6:56, still on the bicycle. Surveillance cameras captured footage of him, still on the bicycle, two minutes later at West 86th Street and Columbus Avenue. By 7 a.m., he was still on 86th Street, no longer on the bicycle. He then took a cab uptown to a bus terminal near the George Washington Bridge.

By 7:30, he had made it to the bus terminal, where video surveillance showed him entering but not coming out, Kenny said.

Police have not been able to find the bicycle, he said.

Investigators also have recovered a cellphone from near the scene of the shooting, and the fake ID that the gunman used to check into the hostel, according to a law enforcement official. Investigators were still trying to gain access to the phone and to determine if it belonged to the gunman.

Investigators have not established a motive, although messages found on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting, including the words “delay” and “deny,” were possible references to ways that insurance companies avoid paying patients’ medical claims.

Police had previously released two surveillance camera images in which the entire face of the person they are seeking is visible, including the one in which he is smiling at the hostel clerk. Both images are grainy, and his face is captured from a sharply downward angle.

Experts in facial recognition technology disagreed on whether the photos would contain enough detail to produce a definitive identification.

Anil Jain, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of Michigan, said the photo in which the man is smiling contains enough detail for a facial recognition system to yield potential results.

“The challenge will be which face database to search against,” Jain said. Law enforcement officials could search the FBI’s mug shot database, the driver’s license databases of New York and neighboring states, or public photos on the internet using a system such as Clearview AI.

A facial recognition search would yield a list of people deemed similar looking to the person in the original photo. Police would need to find other evidence to tie a person identified that way to the crime, Jain said, or risk making a wrongful arrest.

But Alessandro Acquisti, a technology and policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said the photos shared with the public would not be enough to uniquely identify the man because they were not full-frontal images. They could, though, help to “restrict the pool of likely suspects,” he said.

Giorgi Gobronidze, CEO of PimEyes, a face search engine that anyone on the internet can use to find online photos of a person, was skeptical that the poor-quality images would produce reliable results. A facial recognition system performs best with a high-resolution photo of someone looking directly into a camera.

Gobronidze also said that automated facial recognition would work only if images of the person were in the database being searched.

“If the person in the image has little to no online presence,” Gobronidze said, PimEyes “won’t be able to find anything.”

Since Wednesday, police have received “hundreds of tips” from the public, said Carlos Nieves, the department’s assistant commissioner of public information.

Detectives in the department’s Crime Stoppers bureau have been working through the night fielding tips that they then pass on to the investigators. No sooner do they finish one call than another one comes in, Nieves said.

Leads and theories are coming in via the tip line — 800-577-TIPS — or online, some drawn by the high-profile nature of the case and others perhaps by the offer of a reward of as much as $10,000, more than triple the usual amount for such cases.

Police are encouraging anyone with information that they believe could lead to the killer to keep calling, Nieves said.

“You may think that piece of information is trivial,” he said. “But please give us that information and let us decide if it’s trivial or not.”

The smallest bit of information, he said, could be “the piece that puts all this together for us.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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