Stiltwalker attacked at Electric Daisy Carnival on road to recovery

Marco Landin was performing on stilts while wearing an elaborate, heavy dragonfly costume on June 17 at the Electric Daisy Carnival when he suddenly found his stilts in the air.

He plunged head-first toward asphalt. Instinctively, he got his arms in front of him and mostly protected his head from striking the pavement, but he still suffered a mild concussion and multiple fractures in his arms.

He’ll likely be out of work for a year, and his attacker is still unknown.

Landin has been performing on stilts for 20 years. He’s as comfortable and stable on stilts as most people are in sneakers. He’s prepared for nearly anything and is used to people who, for one reason or another, think it’s funny to pretend to try to trip a stilt walker or kick their stilts. What happened at EDC was unprecedented.

Landin’s costume included mechanical wings that were 12 feet across and weighed 30 to 35 pounds. He was performing with a troupe of seven people, six of them on stilts. The other performer was a grounds character, a performer in costume whose duties include a bit of crowd control.

“The assailant and a group of his friends started getting into it with one of the other performers,” Landin said. “He punched a puppet in the face that was part of the performer’s costume and pushed one of the other stilt walkers, and our grounds guy pulled him away, and the guy asked him if he wanted to fight.”

The grounds performer got the aggressor to go away, or so he thought. What he and Landin didn’t know was the assailant looped around the performance area. Landin hadn’t seen the conflict from the start and was unaware of the man’s presence.

“Suddenly, my stilts were above my head, and I had no idea why,” Landin said. “Later, I found out that this guy had just grabbed both my stilts and lifted them straight up like a caber toss at the Highland Games.”

Caber tossing is a Scottish sport in which participants heft a thick pole straight up in the air trying to flip it.

“I broke both radia (one of the two long bones that make up the forearm) at the socket of the wrist,” Landin said. “They were shattered in several places each. It’s just been an enervating series of hellish episodes ever since then with surgery and therapy and all of that stuff. The surgeon had to open up both of my arms at the wrist, and he put three plates and a dozen screws into the bone. He had to get in there and grind everything to the right shape and push everything around and screw it together and fill in the gaps with bone mass from a deceased donor.”

The surgeries began three weeks after the incident, and each wrist was worked on two weeks apart. The surgeries took around six hours each.

“The doctors say it will be at least a year before I’m back up to full professional form,” Landin said. “I can barely spoon cereal into my mouth now, and almost everything I do performance-wise I do with my wrists. My specialty is quadruped stilt performing. It’s like you’re doing pushups all day.”

Spooning cereal into his mouth is a huge improvement from how things were in the first months after the accident. He went through 10 casts as his arms were worked on.

“Nine and 10 are flexible splints, and they can be removed,” Landin said. “That’s great because now I can take a bath without having to have my wife trash bag my arms and wash me like a racehorse, which she had to do for two months. She had to do everything for me. I was completely incapacitated. She had to brush my teeth for me and anything else that you can imagine that goes on in the bathroom. It has definitely brought a new level of intimacy to our relationship.”

He can type on a touch screen now, but mostly he has been using his iPhone’s Siri program to dictate emails and handle other functions. He can’t lift anything heavy, and he can rotate his wrist only four or five degrees.

“There are some things that are surprisingly difficult, like buttoning the top button of my pants,” Landin said. “There are other things I can do OK right now. Last week, I got to where I can flip a couple of eggs for breakfast.”

His wife is also a performer, and the couple operate Dream City, a performing arts company. They perform across the country at music festivals, corporate events, state fairs and other cultural events. Much of the workload has fallen to her. Landin said that the couple split their work pretty evenly at work and at the office, but now she has had to take on all of the work.

“It’s like she’s become a single mom to a broken husband,” Landin said.

The couple has been living off her work, when she can leave her husband long enough to do a job, and their savings. The medical bills are being covered by workman’s compensation insurance because he was working for another company during the attack, but the loss of income during the beginning of the couple’s busiest season of the year has been a hardship. The couple didn’t have unemployment insurance.

“As a small performing arts company, we tend to operate on a shoestring budget,” Landin said. “Unemployment insurance has never been budgeted for. That might change now.”

The couple agreed the previous EDC was going to be their last because the event was proving to be more trouble than it was worth, but when a friend’s group found themselves shorthanded, Landin agreed to work it one more time.

Landin’s goal is to recover and go back to performing and work even harder than before. He and his wife aren’t nervous about returning to their stilts.

“You don’t fear this because it never happens,” Landin said. “It’s like being afraid of an asteroid hitting you on the head. Nobody has ever heard of this.”

Many people have depended on Landin to pitch in and lend a hand over the years. Paloma Solamente, manager of Sin City Gallery and part of management for the performance group Molodi, felt it was time for the community to step up for Landin.

“He is always helping out in the community,” Solamente said. “He’s an amazing guy and an amazing performer. He’s a creative creature. He’s a humble, giving person, and he wouldn’t ask for help.”

She created a GoFundMe page, gofundme.com/marcolandin, to help Landin with his bills while he recovers. The page has a goal of $75,000 and has raised nearly $21,000 to date.

“When the gallery had a big event earlier this year, it was Marco who brought the stage, and he was one of our DJs,” said Solamente, who was among the first people to visit Landin when he got out of the hospital. “When I first saw him after he was hurt, he could barely move. His arms were still wrapped up, and he was on so much medication.”

The attacker was briefly detained by the ground performer before the attacker’s friends pried him free, and they escaped. No video has surfaced of the attack, and eyewitness accounts of the perpetrator — a muscular white man with short blonde hair and no tattoos — were too vague. Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Larry Hadfield said that there were no leads in the case, and it has been closed.

Landin has given a lot of thought to what he would say to his attacker if he met him, other than the obvious, “What were you thinking?”

“This isn’t manly behavior, to take someone who is vulnerable and disregard their entire life by putting it in peril,” Landin said. “I’d tell him, ‘Be a man, don’t be a child. This is not what a man does. A man protects people; he doesn’t injure people.’ He could have killed me.”

Despite what happened, Landin has tried to remain positive and focus on the good that has come out of his ordeal.

“If it wasn’t for friends and strangers helping out financially, we would be completely up a creek without a paddle right now,” Landin said. “They’ve been helping us pay the bills and put food in the fridge. All of this help from friends and kind strangers is something I’ve never needed before. My heart has been broken open in a really good way. People are amazing, they really are.”

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.