A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask across his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan, where Thompson’s company was hosting a conference. New York City police said the shooting was a “targeted attack” and that the gunman remains at large, but few other details have been released. Surveillance video captured the moment the shooter calmly approached Thompson, pointed a pistol equipped with a silencer, fired multiple shots, and fled on an electric bike. Police are now combing through video footage to track him down, including at a nearby Starbucks the shooter visited.

Many who noted the details of the shooting had an immediate question: Is this what a professional hit looks like in real life? The NYPD has said nothing of the sort, but that didn’t stop speculation from running rampant online on Wednesday. Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice with decades of expertise studying professional killers, had unique perspective on that. He’s spent time over the years dispelling myths about contract killings borne of movies and Law & Order episodes. He told me he found aspects of the attack peculiar, and agreed to talk to me while emphasizing that it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions about a crime for which very little information has been released. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

Slate: What were your first impressions when you heard the details of the shooting Wednesday?

Dennis Kenney: The first thing that’s unusual is that the shooter appeared to have a silencer. They’re not impossible to get, but they’re not readily available. The second thing is that he appeared to have inside information on the victim’s location. He knew where to wait and when to wait. The fact that he used the silencer didn’t make sense to me at first, until I saw that the shooting took place at about 6:30 in the morning. Generally, if it was a mid-morning sort of thing, you’d want a gun that made a........

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