The Minnesota boy who was thrown from a Mall of America balcony six years ago and had to undergo emergency surgery and years of rehabilitation is now thriving, his mother said.
Landen Hoffmann was just 5-years-old when a deranged stranger randomly picked him up at the mall and tossed him over the side of the third-floor balcony.
The boy plunged nearly 40 feet, breaking his skull, facial bones, both arms and a leg.
Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda, 24, told cops he was angry at being rejected by women and just “looking for someone to kill” when he set upon the child.
Landen survived, and his mother says the now 11-year-old boy is healthy and happy.
“It was a big, long journey,” Kari Hoffmann told the Daily Mail. “So many miracles happened.”
Landen’s recovery took more than three years in part because his frontal lobe was injured in the fall, his mom said.
She watched her son’s personality change from sweet to angry before he was eventually his happy self again, she said.
“It took time for him to be back to him… He had to learn who he was again,” said Kari.
Landen was in intensive care for four months and had to go through more than a dozen surgeries, and years of physical rehabilitation.
He doesn’t remember the fall, his mother said.
The pair recently paid a visit to the hospital where he spent all those months back in 2019, to give the nurses who cared for him annotated copies of a book Kari wrote on the experience called Miracle at the Mall.
In April 2019, Kari took Landen and one of his friends to the mall as treat following a parent-teacher conference, when she noticed a stranger, later identified as Aranda, speaking to the boys moments before the life-changing incident.
Aranda was sentenced to 19 years behind bars after pleading guilty to attempted murder in 2019.
