By David Futrelle

Last Friday, a man walked up to a mother and her five-year-old boy who were standing outside the Rain Forest Cafe on the third floor of Minnesota’s Mall of America. Without saying a word, he grabbed the boy and threw him over the balcony.

Luckily, the boy survived the fall, and is being treated for multiple severe injuries at a local hospital. His assailant, a 24-year-old man named Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda, was captured as he tried to flee the mall, and has confessed to the crime, according to police. He’s been charged with attempted murder.

As unsettling as all this is, what makes it even more unsettling is the apparent motive for the attack. According to the Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, Aranda was driven by rage over being rejected by women.

A statement put out by the Attorney’s office says that

Aranda told police he had come to the mall on Thursday intending to kill an adult, but that it did not “work out,” according to the complaint. He returned Friday and chose the boy instead. He told police he knew what he was planning to do was wrong. Aranda said he had been coming to the mall for years, tried to speak to women there and they rejected him. That made him lash out and act aggressively.

According to the complaint itself, Aranda had been previously banned from the mall “for throwing water in a woman’s face and destroying property. He has a warrant for his arrest from Illinois for assault. …”

It’s not clear if Aranda had any connection to the incel “movement,” such as it is, or if he was inspired by previous incel acts of violence like Elliot Rodger’s 2014 killing spree or the van attack in Toronto a year ago. But he was clearly motivated by the “aggrieved entitlement” that is rampant among men in America and throughout the world today.

On the Braincels subreddit, the site’s main forum for incels, the regulars seem most concerned that they will get “slammed” for the brutal attempted murder. While no one in the desultory discussion of the case there is glorifying Aranda the way that incels have glorified Elliot Rodger, one commenter is offering him a certain degree of sympathy.

“I think not getting pussy does something to the brain,” writes BBCislaw, “it’s a legitimate issue that will be ignored in favor of mocking the afflicted.”

On Incels.co, the largest incel forum off of Reddit, they don’t seem to have discovered the story yet, though the regulars are currently celebrating the pain suffered by a 22-year-old “Stacey” who apparently fell from a clock tower while attempting to take a selfie, and voting in a poll on what they see as the proper punishment for couples who kiss in public. (At the moment, “torture/death by soldering iron” is in the lead.)

The incel ideology is pure poison.

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