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A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask over his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan, where Thompson’s company was hosting a conference. The New York Police Department 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. Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has decades of expertise studying professional killers, has a unique perspective on that. He’s spent years dispelling myths about contract killings born 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 edited and condensed for clarity.

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 midmorning sort of thing, you’d want a gun that made a lot of noise to scare observers off. But obviously, at that time, no one was around. It also suggested that the urgency of the shooting was important. CEOs of health care companies are just not that hard to find in isolated settings. So the fact that he chose to do it in midtown Manhattan was a little bit unique.

Police called it a “brazen targeted attack.” You’ve studied contract killings and so-called hit men and sought to dispel myths about these kinds of crimes. What do you think of speculation that this was a hit?

I think it’s pretty unlikely. My understanding is the CEO was being investigated for insider trading and some other financial violation. The fact that he ran a health care company—they tend to leave a lot of angry people in their wake. So, it seemed to be someone who knew what they were doing, but the idea of a professional hit man, those are pretty few and far between. So I would think more likely it was somebody with a particular grudge that had access to inside information to know where to be and when to be there.

Do contract killings usually play out in such dramatic fashion?

A professional hit man would probably prefer to do something less public with limited exposure. Doing it in the middle of midtown—there’s just too many things that can go wrong, so you probably prefer generally not to do it there. However, if it was time sensitive, then that would make a difference. There’s a range of hit men, so it could be somebody that was hired, but it’s unlikely.

Is there any other reason you think it’s unlikely?

This obviously was not the target’s usual routine. A professional would generally try to catch him in his regular routine in a place where the exposure of the shooter is minimized so that the risk of being caught or observed is pretty low. Manhattan, particularly in midtown, you’ve got cameras everywhere. I understand that they’ve got some fairly decent shots of the guy’s face while he was in Starbucks or something like that nearby. The exposure was fairly high, and most professionals don’t like that amount of risk. Again, unless it was time sensitive—there could be any number of reasons why it was important that it happened that day.

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New York City Police Department

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