The man arrived in New York on a bus from somewhere south of the city on Nov. 24, the official said, and checked into the hostel on the Upper West Side. Sometime after that, he checked out on Nov. 29, and checked back in the next day, the official added.

That and a series of other developments — details of the stay at the hostel, a possible link to a gun purchased in Connecticut, bullet casings inscribed with the words “deny” and “delay” — suggested investigators could be inching closer to identifying the gunman.

Investigators have not established a motive in the shooting but the authorities have said the gunman appeared to have targeted the executive, Brian Thompson, 50, of UnitedHealthcare, by waiting for him early Wednesday morning before firing several shots that left him crumpled and dying on the pavement.

The gunman had been in New York City for approximately 10 days before killing Mr. Thompson, a senior law enforcement official said, adding that the authorities were canvassing many locations and building a timeline of the shooter’s whereabouts on the second day of their search for him.

The authorities have been flooded with tips from all over the country, and each potentially credible one must be run down, a senior law enforcement official said.

One of investigators’ main goals remains finding a surveillance image of the suspected shooter where his face is entirely unobscured, a senior law enforcement official said, describing the man as extremely camera savvy.

The authorities were focusing on a man who stayed at the Manhattan hostel before the shooting. Guests there said investigators visited as early as Wednesday evening, and the images released Thursday morning show a man inside the hostel with his mask lowered.

Investigators were also looking into the purchase of a gun in Connecticut that resembled the weapon used in the shooting, and into messages found on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting including the words “delay” and “deny” — possible references to ways that insurance companies seek to avoid paying patients’ medical claims.

Here’s what else to know:

Insurance denials and rage: The brazen Midtown killing has unleashed a torrent of criticism of insurance companies, in particular the one Mr. Thompson led, UnitedHealthcare. As one of the nation’s largest health insurers, covering more than 50 million people, the company has battled a range of complaints and investigations from patients, doctors and lawmakers for its denial of medical claims.

An in-demand accessory: The gunman appears to have used a silencer, an attachment long associated with Hollywood hit men but rarely seen in real-life murders. Sales of them have skyrocketed in popularity, however; nearly five million are registered in the United States, up from 285,000 in 2011.

Threats investigated: The police are offering a $10,000 reward for information about Mr. Thompson’s killing, and said they are also exploring his background and social media for clues. Mr. Thompson had recently received several threats, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation.

As is typical for public rewards offered by the department, the money would be supplied not by the N.Y.P.D. itself but by the donor-funded New York City Police Foundation, an independent nonprofit that also provides safety equipment and other resources.

The Police Foundation has bankrolled the department’s payments for public information since 1983, and says it has covered more than $3 million in rewards over those four decades.

The payment program, called Crime Stoppers, maintains a tip hotline and offers up to $3,500 for any information that leads to an indictment for a violent crime.

But the foundation said that it had approved a request by the Police Department for an additional $6,500 — nearly tripling the normal offer — to seek information about the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of the UnitedHealthcare.

Mr. Thompson, 50, was shot by a masked gunman early Wednesday morning outside the New York Hilton Midtown, which was hosting his company’s annual investors day.

The reward could grow if the Police Foundation approved an increase, and the reward could also be boosted through other sources, including government funds or private contributions.

The Police Department said that it never uses its own funding for rewards, and that the policy helps ensure that tipsters can remain anonymous.

Tips to Crime Stoppers have helped solve more than 5,000 violent crime cases, according to the police.

The department has at times offered five-figure rewards for information about unsolved homicides or the attempted murder of a police officer.

The offer of $10,000 for information on the killing of Mr. Thompson is on the “upper end” of the reward scale and could motivate people to come forward, said Richard M. Aborn, the president of the nonprofit Citizens Crime Commission.

“It means there’s a very high-profile shooting that is being taken incredibly seriously,” Mr. Aborn said, adding, “Information is the life blood of policing, and cops are going to do whatever they can to get information.”

Eli B. Silverman, a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who has written extensively about the city’s police, said he was initially surprised by the size of the reward. But he said the prominent location of the shooting, the high profile of the victim and the intense news coverage explained the offer.

“This person is more than a statistic,” Mr. Silverman said. “This stands out. This attracts attention. And so I think that’s why they’re going that way.”

While the words “deny” and “delay” have multiple meanings, they could be a reference to the tactics used by insurers of all kinds to avoid paying claims. The words are so linked to those practices that they were used in the title of a 2010 book probing them, “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.”

“An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims,” wrote the book’s author, Jay Feinman, an emeritus professor at Rutgers. “If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits.”

No one knows how often private insurers like UnitedHealthcare deny claims because they are generally not required to publish that data. People who bought coverage under Obamacare, a government-funded plan, had 17 percent of their care denied in 2021, according to KFF, a health policy group. Other surveys have found that denials are more prevalent among those with private insurance than those who carried government coverage.

UnitedHealthcare, part of the giant conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, reported more than $16 billion in operating profits last year and employed roughly 140,000 people. The company is a frequent lightning rod for criticism over how it handles claims.

Earlier this year, a Senate committee investigated Medicare Advantage plans denying nursing care to patients who were recovering from falls and strokes. It concluded that three major companies — UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS, which owns Aetna — were intentionally denying claims for this expensive care to increase profits. UnitedHealthcare, the report noted, denied requests for such nursing stays three times more often than it did for other services. (Humana had an even higher figure, denying at a rate 16 times higher.)

UnitedHealthcare did not respond to a request for comment about its history of claim denial.

Journalists have also scrutinized United’s denial practices. In January, the health news outlet Stat published a detailed investigation into how a UnitedHealthcare subsidiary, NaviHealth, used algorithms to deny care for seniors enrolled in the company’s Medicare advantage plan.

The Stat investigation noted specific instances that troubled United employees, like when an older woman who had a stroke was only covered for half the nursing days typically required for recovery.

UnitedHealthcare and its parent company now face a class-action lawsuit over its use of the algorithm. In response to the Stat article, the company issued a statement that “the assertions that NaviHealth uses or incentivizes employees to use a tool to deny care are false.”

A 2023 story from ProPublica dived deep into the experience of one United patient, a college student who racked up $2 million in medical claims a year to treat a severe case of ulcerative colitis. The story showed United disregarding an internal report finding the expensive treatment to be necessary. The patient eventually sued United and received an undisclosed amount in a settlement.

Insurance denials are rarely appealed, with some studies finding appeal rates of roughly 1 percent.

UnitedHealthcare, in response to the ProPublica story, said that the patient took his medication at dosages that “far exceed” Food and Drug Administration guidelines, which led the insurer to “review treatment plans based on current clinical guidelines to help ensure patient safety.”

Since the news of Mr. Thompson’s death on Wednesday, some individuals on social media have expressed frustration over the company’s history of denying claims. Others have gone even further, celebrating the death of a top insurance executive.

The insurance industry has pushed back against the outrage. “The people in our industry are mission-driven professionals working to make coverage and care as affordable as possible and to help people navigate the complex medical system,” said Michael Tuffin, the president of AHIP, a major trade group, on LinkedIn. “We condemn any suggestion that threats against our colleagues — or anyone else in our country — are ever acceptable.”

Despite those hurdles, silencers have skyrocketed in popularity — nearly five million are registered in the United States, up from 285,000 in 2011. The boom in sales is largely the result of a marketing effort by the firearms industry to rebrand silencers as health care devices that prevent hearing damage from gunfire. The industry has also successfully pressured federal regulators to speed up application processing times.

The firearms industry wants to go much further: It is supporting lawsuits to overturn remaining state bans on silencers and pushing federal legislation to remove them from the National Firearms Act, the 1934 law that made them harder to purchase. Those goals have been energized by Republican victories in the November election and a Supreme Court that is more gun friendly than in the past.

Silencers can reduce the sound of a gunshot below 140 decibels, the limit for what is considered safe, though similar protection can be achieved by using ear plugs and earmuffs, which are standard at shooting ranges. The growing popularity of the devices has increased concern that they could render a mass shooting harder to detect. Silencers also reduce muzzle flash and recoil, making it easier for a gunman with a semiautomatic weapon to keep aiming and shooting.

Silencers are not often linked to crimes, although instances of their use have been gradually increasing, according to federal trace data. Gun rights groups claim that the criminal use of silencers is not a problem, while gun safety advocates say stricter regulation of the devices has worked.

“In all of my years of law enforcement, I have never seen a silencer before,” Mayor Eric Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday. “And so that was really something that was shocking to us all.”

In May, a Pennsylvania man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling “hit kits” comprising untraceable ghost guns, silencers and subsonic ammunition, which is quieter than regular rounds.

When Payton Gendron was planning his mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket two years ago, he sought a silencer for his AR-15-style rifle. However, as he explained in his manifesto, he could not readily obtain one — they are banned in New York. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “suppressors are hard to get in the U.S. legally, and I don’t have the machining equipment to make one.”

But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.

“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”

On TikTok, one user wrote, “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”

The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafka-esque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.

Messages that law enforcement officials say were found on bullet casings at the scene of the shooting in front of a Midtown hotel — “delay” and “deny” — are two words familiar to many Americans who have interacted with insurance companies for almost anything other than routine doctor visits.

Mr. Thompson was chief executive of his company’s insurance division, which reported $281 billion in revenue last year, providing coverage to millions of Americans through the health plans it sold to individuals, employers and people under government programs like Medicare. The division employs roughly 140,000 people.

Mr. Thompson received a $10.2 million compensation package last year, a combination of $1 million in base pay and cash and stock grants. He was shot to death as he was walking toward the annual investor day for UnitedHealth Group, UnitedHealthcare’s parent company.

Stephan Meier, the chair of the management division at Columbia Business School, said the attack could send shock waves through the broader health insurance industry.

About seven chief executives of publicly traded companies die each year, he said, but almost always from health complications or accidents. A targeted attack could have much larger implications.

“The insurance industry is not the most loved, to put it mildly,” Mr. Meier said. “If you’re a C-suite executive of another insurance company, I would be thinking, What’s this mean for me? Am I next?”

A longtime employee of UnitedHealthcare said that workers at the company had been aware for years that members were unhappy. Mr. Thompson was one of the few executives who wanted to do something about it, said the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the company does not allow workers to speak publicly without permission.

In speeches to employees, Mr. Thompson spoke about the need to change the state of health care coverage in the country and the culture of the company, topics other executives avoided, the employee said.

Already, there is heightened concern among some public-facing health care companies, said Eric Sean Clay, the president of the International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety. The trade group includes members that offer security to some of the largest health care companies in North America.

“The C.E.O.s are quite often the most visible face of an organization,” he said. “Sometimes people hate on that individual, and wish to do them harm.”

But few health care companies provide security for their executives, he said, in part to avoid bad optics, or because it may seem unnecessary.

In the hours after the shooting early Wednesday morning, social media exploded with anger toward the insurance industry and Mr. Thompson.

“I pay $1,300 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible. ($23,000 yearly) When I finally reached that deductible, they denied my claims. He was making a million dollars a month,” read one comment on TikTok.

Another commenter wrote, “This needs to be the new norm. EAT THE RICH.”

“The ambulance ride to the hospital probably won’t be covered,” wrote a commenter on a TikTok video in which another user featured an audio clip from the Netflix show “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.” In it, the queen makes a dramatic show of faux sorrow over a death.

The shooting prompted a wrenching outpouring of patients and family members who also posted horror stories of insurance claim reimbursement stagnation and denials.

One woman expressed frustration with trying to get a special bed for her disabled son covered by UnitedHealthcare. Another user described struggling with bills and coverage after giving birth.

“It is so stressful,” the user said in a video. “I was sick over this.”

Stefanos Chen and Maria Cramer contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

And they captured video of the gunman, who was dressed in black and wearing a gray backpack, crossing the street and walking up to Mr. Thompson. He appeared calm as he raised a gun, fired several times and then walked away.

The seconds before Wednesday morning’s shooting of Mr. Thompson, the fatal moments and the immediate aftermath were all captured on surveillance cameras, leaving investigators with a trail of digital evidence to help search for a man who was “proficient” with firearms, according to Joseph Kenny, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Police Department, with help from the federal government, poured resources into expanding its surveillance capabilities. New York City now has a vast system of cameras, both public and private, that the police can scour to locate people.

The city has “investigatory capabilities that are above and beyond most municipalities,” said Brittney Blair, a senior director in the investigations and disputes practice at K2 Integrity, which advises companies on risk management and security.

On Wednesday, cameras inside a Starbucks two blocks from the crime scene that the gunman visited minutes before the shooting captured his partially hidden face.

Others showed the gunman waiting for Mr. Thompson, and then recorded him fleeing on a bicycle into Central Park, where he disappeared.

By late Wednesday, the police had released at least five images of the suspect, but had not announced arrests. They had not identified the shooter or a motive.

Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said the police would use its aviation unit, dogs and drones to find the killer.

Investigators would work backward to create a timeline, talking to Mr. Thompson’s friends, colleagues and family, scrutinizing his social media accounts and analyzing surveillance footage around Midtown, the police said.

“An incident like this happens, we don’t spare any expense,” Chief Maddrey said.

The footage revealed a chilling encounter between the seemingly calm gunman and an unsuspecting executive from Minnesota.

The gunman raised the weapon, heedless of a woman standing nearby on the sidewalk. He fired several times, hitting Mr. Thompson in the calf and back, as the woman ran away, according to the footage.

Mr. Thompson barely had time to whirl and face his attacker before crumpling to the ground. The gunman fiddled with his weapon, which had appeared to jam, and shot again as he walked toward Mr. Thompson.

As Mr. Thompson lay bleeding, the gunman jogged across 54th Street and fled through a pedestrian passageway near the Ziegfeld Ballroom before appearing again on West 55th Street. The police would later find a cellphone in that passage.

Then, he got on a bike that he rode north, Chief Kenny said. At 6:48 a.m., at the same time that the police found Mr. Thompson dying on the sidewalk, the shooter was riding into Central Park on Center Drive. That was the last time he was seen, the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said.

Later Wednesday, police officers gathered at a Citi Bike kiosk at Madison Avenue and 82nd Street on the Upper East Side. They were asking doormen and building superintendents nearby for video footage that might have captured activity around the dock.

Despite the ubiquity of cameras across the five boroughs, seemingly tracking New Yorkers’ every move, the police have not always been able to harness their collective power to find suspects quickly.

In April 2022, after Frank James opened fire on a packed Brooklyn subway train during midweek rush hour, it took more than 31 hours for officers to track him down even though he had been captured on surveillance video.

Members of the public eventually tipped the police off to his whereabouts: A 17-year-old boy on a school field trip in Chinatown spotted Mr. James in a park, and then a different caller told investigators that he was at a McDonald’s in the East Village. Mr. James was eventually arrested near Sixth Street and First Avenue.

“It’s never as speedy as you would want it to be or like they show on TV,” said Ms. Blair of K2 Integrity.

“Those investigations are extremely tedious,” said Ms. Blair, who is a former director of intelligence operations at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Chicago. “It takes analysis of tens of thousands of hours of footage from all different camera sources.”

Even with New York’s level of technology and surveillance, the police must rely on investigators who are keen observers and can identify someone by looking at their shape and movements, Ms. Blair said. And the public remains a critical ally of the police, who distribute images and descriptions of suspects in the hope that someone will help identify them, she said.

“There is no magic button you can press to immediately identify someone like this,” Ms. Blair said.

“But,” she added, “of all the places in this country to commit a crime like this, Manhattan would be the dead last location on my list.”

Claire Fahy , Corey Kilgannon and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.

And early on Wednesday morning, it became the backdrop for a high-profile killing, when a man gunned down Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, near an entrance, before fleeing on a bicycle.

“Someone got shot outside,” an attendee of a conference was overheard saying on his way upstairs, where people were chatting over cups of coffee before the day’s events began. It seemed like just another day of business-minded mingling in New York.

That someone would turn out to be Mr. Thompson, a head of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, and one of the scheduled speakers at the event, the UnitedHealth Group’s Investor Conference 2024. As attendees gathered, news crews were massing on the street below, the police were searching for the hooded shooter, and, at Mount Sinai West, a hospital just uptown, Mr. Thompson, 50, was dead after sustaining gunshot wounds.

As the news spread, the conference was called off, attendees pulled off their lanyards and headed for the exits, carry-on luggage in tow.

Mark Sanders, the general manager of the New York Hilton Midtown, said in an email that the hotel staff was shaken by the crime. “We are deeply saddened by this morning’s events in the area and our thoughts are with all affected by the tragedy,” he said.

But at the hotel, by necessity, life paused, then went on. A hotel is meant to be calm — this one in particular perhaps, serving if not as an oasis, then a carpeted pocket of quiet against the volume of Midtown, with its coffee carts and taxi cabs, its sidewalks jammed with tourists and men and women walking, head down, in suits. The hotel staff, in its heavily trafficked lobby, projects an aura of having seen it all, and having looked away.

Though yellow police tape closed off a section of West 54th Street just outside a side entrance, hotel guests continued traipsing in and out of the main entrance on Wednesday morning. Natasha Reyes, a cashier at the gift shop, said that she had arrived about an hour before the shooting, and never heard anything at all.

This is probably how it was when other major events were happening around the hotel. When, for example, Mr. Presley, in a baby-blue suit, was giving an interview in a ballroom. Or when Neil Sheehan and his colleagues from The New York Times booked several rooms to compile the story on the leaked government report that would roil the nation with its revelations about the Vietnam War. Or when an engineer from Motorola placed the first call ever made from a handheld cellular phone from the sidewalk outside.

Hotels are meant to absorb whatever happens. If there is conflict or even tragedy, they are just the backdrop.

Mr. Thompson’s killing on Wednesday outside a midtown Manhattan hotel as he was walking toward the UnitedHealth Group’s annual investor day sent shock waves through the nation’s vast health care sector. The fatal shooting elicited an outpouring of sympathy from rival insurers, executives, health care providers and others.

During Mr. Thompson’s tenure as chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, the company’s profits rose, with earnings from operations topping $16 billion in 2023 from $12 billion in 2021. Mr. Thompson received a total compensation package last year of $10.2 million, a combination of $1 million in base pay and cash and stock grants.

He oversaw significant growth in one of the company’s key businesses, the sale of private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage, a program mainly for those 65 and older that receives federal funds and now covers roughly half of the 61 million people signing up.

“He sure as heck had a lot of role in the proliferation of Medicare Advantage,” said Matt Burns, a former United executive who spent several years working for Mr. Thompson, whom colleagues knew as BT.

Mr. Thompson grew up in Jewell, Iowa, where his father, the late Dennis Thompson, worked for decades as a grain elevator operator. From a modest background, Mr. Thompson had achieved executive status but remained open and approachable, Mr. Burns said. When asked to develop a long-term plan for the company, he solicited input from top executives and then synthesized their views. “That speaks to how inherently sharp he was and how well he knew the business,” Mr. Burns said.

Steve Nelson, the president of Aetna and a former chief executive at UnitedHealthcare, worked with Mr. Thompson for close to a decade. “He actually was the smartest guy in the room, without being annoying,” Mr. Nelson said of his former colleague, who described his self-deprecating sense of humor. “He would make fun of himself a lot,” Mr. Nelson said, who said Mr. Thompson was an amateur wrestler who liked to challenge colleagues to arm wrestling.

He was also well-regarded by Wall Street analysts, where he was known for his reassuring descriptions of the company’s outlook.

On a recent call with Wall Street analysts and investors to discuss the company’s financial results, Mr. Thompson provided a confident voice when questioned. When asked about the employer segment, he told one analyst, “I feel really good about not only our performance, but our cost management inside our commercial business.”

Mr. Thompson had presided over the division as it faced multiple inquiries and has been criticized by congressional lawmakers and federal regulators who accused it of systematically denying authorization for health care procedures and treatments.

The insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group has also been under federal scrutiny because the parent company was the victim of a broad cyberattack on its billing and payment system, Change Healthcare. Private information, including health data, from more than 100 million Americans was compromised in the ransomware attack. The parent company paid $22 million in ransom in an effort to stop the hackers.

UnitedHealth Group has a sprawling dominance over nearly every segment of health care, and it is one of the nation’s largest companies overall, with $372 billion in revenue last year. But its massive size and scope have attracted the attention of the Justice Department, which is looking into whether the company has engaged in any anti-competitive behavior. The company’s proposed acquisition of a major home care company recently resulted in a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department and four state attorneys general seeking to block the deal.

In addition, Bloomberg News reported that several of UnitedHealth Group’s executives sold stock. According to regulatory filings, Mr. Thompson owned about $20 million of shares in the parent company as of late September. In April, Bloomberg reported that he was one of at least four executives at the company who had sold shares before the Justice Department antitrust investigation was disclosed to the company’s investors — about $15 million worth in Mr. Thompson’s case. The company told Bloomberg at the time that the sales had been approved.

After Mr. Thompson joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004, he rose steadily, taking on various finance roles and eventually overseeing the company’s government plans offered to people who qualify for Medicare or Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor. United’s management of those plans has also been scrutinized by the federal government.

Those who worked with him during that time said he was responsive to concerns about how to serve the individuals in those programs. “Every interaction with him felt extremely genuine,” said Antonio Ciaccia, a consultant who discussed using pharmacists to help provide better care for people receiving Medicaid. “He was a very good listener.”

Before he went to work at United, Mr. Thompson spent nearly seven years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, also known as PwC, the large accounting firm. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an accounting major in May 1997.

A number of the insurer’s rivals and analysts said they were shocked by the news of his killing, and praised his management style.

“It’s a very dark day for all of health care,” said Michael Ha, an analyst at Baird who was at the investor conference on Wednesday. “He was so smart, talented leader, very well-respected, with such a bright future as a health care leader.”

Gail Boudreaux, the chief executive of Elevance Health, said that overseeing health care organizations “is marked by dedication, compassion and a profound commitment to improving lives, and Brian embodied these qualities and more.’’

“I knew him to be a visionary leader who developed innovative ideas to take on some of the nation’s greatest challenges,” said Kim Keck, the chief executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which represents Blue Cross plans. “His death is a great loss for our country and for the health care industry.”

Mr. Nelson of Aetna said he would not speculate about any motive for Mr. Thompson’s murder, but he noted that insurance executives are sometimes the target of people’s frustrations with the health care system.

“I’m not going to say that it comes with the territory, because that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Nobody should ever feel their life is threatened for doing their job.”

In a video sent to UnitedHealth employees, Andrew Witty, the parent company’s chief executive, said: “Brian was a truly extraordinary person who touched the lives of countless people throughout our organization and far beyond. It’s a terrible tragedy.” The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the video message.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the company said it was working closely with the New York Police Department. “Our hearts go out to Brian’s family and all who were close to him,” the company said.

Mr. Thompson lived with his family in a suburb of Minneapolis. He is survived by his wife, Paulette R. Thompson, a physical therapist who works for a Minnesota health system, and two children.

Joe Rennison , Stefanos Chen, Julie Creswell and Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting.