Parents blast ‘evil’ attacker handed 19 years for throwing boy from mall balcony

Emmanuel Aranda showed little emotion during his hearing. When Hennepin County District Judge Jeannice Reding asked whether he wanted to say anything on his own behalf, the 24-year-old Minneapolis man responded with a simple “No”.

Judge Reding then sentenced him to the term he agreed to when he pleaded guilty last month to attempted premeditated first-degree murder after the attack on April 12.

Aranda told investigators he went to the Mall of America in Minneapolis “looking for someone to kill”.

According to the complaint, he had tried unsuccessfully to talk to women in the mall but their rejection “caused him to lash out and be aggressive”. He said he had planned to kill an adult before choosing the child instead.

The boy, identified in court only as Landen, plunged almost 40ft and needed multiple operations for head trauma and broken bones. No update on his recovery was provided in court, although his parents described it as “miraculous”.

“Your act was evil and selfish, you chose to listen to the worst parts of yourself that day,” the boy’s father said in a statement read by prosecutor Cheri Ann Townsend.

“You chose evil over good and chose to take your hate and hurt out on my precious boy. That is where your impact on us stops, you will take nothing more from us.”

Both parents, whose statements were full of references to their Christian faith, said they forgave Aranda because they believe God expects them to.

“You chose to think about yourself that day, what you were feeling and wanted to do to someone else,” Landen’s mother said in a separate statement read by the prosecutor.

“I’m sad you chose anger and hatred.”

Aranda’s lawyer Paul Sellers did not raise a mental illness defence. Aranda did acknowledge in response to a question from the judge that he had been in mental health court previously and completed required treatment. They did not go into details.

Aranda’s mother, Becky Aranda, and family friend Jessica Harris told reporters afterwards that he had been in and out of mental health treatment while growing up in Chicago, with frequently changing diagnoses, including attention deficit disorder, depression, autism and schizophrenia.

They said that as far as they know, he was homeless before the attack, and his comprehension level is more like a five-year-old child’s than an adult’s.

Ms Aranda said her son belongs in a mental hospital, not prison. She said she last saw him in November and had been rebuffed in her efforts to visit him in jail.

“We’re trying to figure out what happened, what led him to do this,” she said. “We need answers as much as everybody else.”

Mary Moriarty, the chief public defender for Hennepin County, said her office must honour its duty of confidentiality to its clients. She indicated defence lawyers were following Aranda’s wishes in resolving the case quickly.

“One of our jobs, one of our goals as public defenders, is to build a trusting relationship with the client and to try to achieve what the client’s goals are,” she said.