Just some experts throwing cold water on the hitman theory:
-The consensus among experts following the
killing of Brian Thompson, the veteran chief executive of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, was that the shooter could indeed handle himself around a gun, but that everything else suggested that he was
unlikely to have been hired to commit the crime.
“Forgive me for saying too much on too little evidence, but it looks like the
kind of guy that made up his mind that he was doing the right thing,” said David Shapiro, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and a former F.B.I. special agent.
“He didn’t look like a guy that was fearful.”
He added: “In terms of a professional hit man, that seems unlikely. It would be very hard to get somebody to do something like this. It’s very high risk.”
-“I mean, the whole problem is doing the whole thing in Midtown Manhattan, even though it’s in the morning,” he continued. Not only are there
“cameras everywhere,” he said, “there’s too much of a possibility of other people intervening, of a cop happening to walk by.”
He added: “There’s just
too much that can go wrong and there’s too little that you control.”
-None of this looks like the work of a professional, the experts said. (Assassinations occur but are usually ordered by governments or criminal groups like drug cartels, and rarely leave behind much cevidence, they said.)
Three days after an insurance executive was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk, the authorities provided a detailed timeline of the suspect’s movements. It was not yet known what was in the backpack.
www.nytimes.com
