What would you do if this little boy was your child? The troubled man accused of throwing a 5-year-old boy from the third floor of the Mall of America is now charged with attempted murder.
Many people travel from miles around to this famed mall to experience some of their attractions and activities that would never be experienced at your average mall. Never would it be conceived that the horrific act of throwing a small child over a balcony would be witnessed.
Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda, 24, of Minneapolis is expected to make his first court appearance on Tuesday, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said. Prosecutors will ask for bail to be set at $2 million. He is being charged with attempted premeditated first-degree murder in Friday’s attack . The child plunged almost 40 feet and is fighting for his life in a Minneapolis hospital with head trauma and multiple broken bones.
This gruesome case has stunned everyone. “That a child, with his mother, at a safe public area like a mall, could be violently attacked for no reason is chilling for everyone,” Freeman said. ” Mr. Aranda is charged with the most severe crime that the evidence allowed.”
The boy’s mother told police that Aranda came up very close to her group as they stood outside the Rainforest Cafe restaurant. She said she asked him if they were in his way and if they should move, and he picked up the child without warning and threw him off the balcony.
Witnesses said Aranda either pushed or threw the boy from the third level of the mall’s interior to the first-level floor, nearly 40 feet below. Police reported that Aranda ran away, but was later found in the mall’s transit station and arrested. The boy, Landen, remains in critical condition, his family said in a statement through the Bloomington Police Department.
Aranda told police he had come to the mall a day earlier intending to kill an adult, but that did not “work out,” according to the complaint.
So he returned Friday and chose the boy instead. Aranda also told police he knew what he was planning to do was wrong. He explained he had visited the mall for years, trying to speak to women there, but they rejected him. Aranda said that made him lash out.
Aranda has two past convictions for assaults at the mall, both in 2015, including one in which he threw a glass of water and glass of tea at a woman who refused to buy him something. In that incident, he got into a scuffle with the manager of the restaurant, sending panicked diners fleeing, court records show. Aranda, at one point, was also banned from the mall due to causing damage inside stores after he threw items off the upper level of the mall to the lower level. Court records show that Aranda had been ordered to undergo psychological evaluation or treatment after these earlier mall assaults. Aranda was charged in July 2015.
Police have also encountered Aranda at a Minneapolis library. In August 2015, witnesses saw Aranda smashing computers at the library, causing about $5,000 in damage, according to a 2015 complaint. Officers found him at a bus stop across the street and arrested him.
In that case, Aranda told authorities he got “angry after he read something on the Facebook.” So he smashed five computers, screens and keyboards, court records show, citing a recorded statement.
“He said he has some anger issues and told the officer that it does not happen all the time,” the complaint states.
The child’s family has asked for privacy during this time of recovery. A GoFundMe page set up for the child, named Landen, had attracted nearly $600,000 in donations as of Monday. The family sincerely appreciates the outpouring of support from the community and our prayers and thoughts are with Landen for complete physical and emotional healing. Continue to be brave, Landen!
