Three and a half years ago, the mother of a five-year-old boy watched in horror as a man threw her son off a third-floor balcony at a local shopping mall. Now, the same woman says she has forgiven the man who tried to kill her son.
Kari Hoffmann recalled the incident to ABC’s Good Morning America recently. She said the time was right in her family’s lives to move forward and tell the story of the miracle of Landen after they had done “a lot of healing.”
On April 12, 2019, Landen Hoffmann was shopping with his mother and friends when he was thrown over the rail of a balcony by 24-year-old Emmanuel Aranda.
As CBN News reported at the time, Aranda told police that he had gone to the mall intending to kill an adult “because they usually stand near the balcony” but it did not “work out.”
“We were just looking at the alligator at the Rainforest Café, and a stranger came up and was whispering to these two little boys. And I thought that he was gonna turn this alligator on for them,” Hoffmann told ABC. “He snatched {Landen} and ran. And I was just frozen … It happened so fast. I screamed, ‘No!’ after he was already thrown.”
Landen fell to the first floor and suffered broken arms and legs.
“I don’t even remember running down the escalators, but I was screaming the whole time, ‘No, Landen’s not gonna die,'” his mother said.
A crowd quickly gathered, Hoffman said, and she asked them to pray.
Although mallgoers were heard screaming as Landen landed, witnesses say his mother was heard yelling “just pray!”
“I don’t care who was looking. If they were looking, I asked them to pray,” Hoffmann told ABC. “He’s got a heartbeat. He was breathing. We got in the ambulance, and right before they shut the door, he opened his eyes for a second.”
Hoffmann said Landen was rushed into emergency brain trauma surgery. Relatives gathered while her son was on the operating table, and they were all there when a doctor delivered the news: Her son was “going to be ok.”
“Listening to him breathing with the machine’s beeping was the best sound I’ve ever heard in my life,” said Hoffmann. “Because that meant he was alive.”
The boy was in the hospital for four months. He was released just in time to attend the first day of kindergarten that year.
ABC reports in May 2019, Aranda pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 years in prison for the attack. Aranda was reportedly banned from the mall in two other instances.
Hoffmann said she’s forgiven Aranda because “it’s a decision that you have to make so that God can do what he needs to do in your life … and that was to save Landen.”
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Last year, the Hoffmanns’ settled their lawsuit against Mall of America that sought unspecified damages for Landen’s medical expenses.
The family and the company released a joint statement saying they would work together to make sure such an incident will not happen again.
“Mall of America and the family have agreed to work together with a focus on safety, and already are jointly pursuing policy changes to existing trespass limits for violent criminals so as to give greater ability to preclude such persons from their premises,” the statement read, in part.
Now 8 years old, Landen enjoys playing hockey and is looking forward to his birthday in January, Hoffmann said.
“Angels caught him, there’s no denying it,” she told ABC. “Yes, he had injuries, and we had to live through all of this pain to get to the end. But sometimes God allows us to go through things to teach us something.”
As CBN News reported at the time, Pastor Mac Hammond of the Living Word Christian Church in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, visited the Hoffmann family while Landen was recuperating in the hospital.
During an Easter service that spring, Hammond told his congregation about what one of the boy’s attending physicians said about Landen’s incident.
“This is truly a miracle. It’s like he fell off a bicycle instead of off the third floor of the mall,” Hammond said, recalling the doctor’s own words.
Hammond told the church it was an Easter miracle.
“This is resurrection power…this is what the Word will do,” he noted. “It’ll open up power to you to restore whatever the enemy is able to bring about or fend him off completely.”
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN