EDC stilts performer, attacked first night of festival, on the mend

Marco Landin was dressed as a dragonfly, on stilts and in the middle of a performance when he was attacked early June 18, a few hours into the first night of the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas last weekend.

Above him were flashing lights, lasers and sky. Below him was the chaotic crowd. And Landin was in the zone, with a cast of characters at his side.

“I’m doing my thing, and all of a sudden I start levitating,” Landin said at his home Thursday. “I’m thinking, why am I not on the ground?”

A man had crept up behind the 49-year-old veteran festival performer and picked him up by his stilts — squatting down, squeezing Landin’s outstretched legs together and deadlifting him.

For a moment, Landin was in the air. And then the man lobbed Landin forward.

“Before I even knew I was falling, I was falling,” Landin said.

From 9 feet above ground, Landin came careening down toward the concrete below. He threw his hands in front of his face and braced for impact, which came — hard.

“Basically I felt my bones break in my wrists, and then my head hit the concrete,” Landin said. “I remember a flash of pain in my head and I just blacked out.”

Medical crews would later confirm his wrists were broken and both radius bones, which are in the forearm, were shattered. He also suffered a concussion.

When Landin came to, he was surrounded by the characters who were performing with him moments earlier. Together, they started taking off his “cumbersome costume” so medics could tend to his arms.

And his costume was cumbersome — aside from the stilts, he was wearing large, mechanical dragonfly wings that stretch 12 feet across. When he fell, they came crashing down too.

The wood braces snapped. The decorative mirrors shattered. And the man who attacked Landin got away.

Before throwing Landin about 12:15 a.m. near the 7UP stage, the man had been taunting some of his nearby castmates, Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Michael Rodriguez said. The man had punched a puppet — part of a costume one of Landin’s castmates was wearing — and when a security guard pulled him away, the man yelled at the guard, trying to start a fight, police said.

But the security guard didn’t fight and instead told the man to leave, Landin said. Less than a minute later, the man circled back behind the cast and grabbed Landin in the surprise attack.

After the incident, Rodriguez said, a guard initially caught the man who did it and pinned him down. But the man’s small posse peeled the security guard away, and together, the group disappeared into the dancing festival crowd.

“The only description the other performers were able to give was an average, shirtless white male in jean shorts,” said Landin’s wife, Heather Hyde-Landin, who also works festivals and was at EDC the night of the incident. “He had no tattoos, no discerning marks, not particularly hairy. Just an aggressive white guy.”

Landin’s wife, 34, was nearing the end of her shift at a marketing booth at the festival when she heard her husband had fallen. It wasn’t until she reached him at the medical tent that she realized he was injured in an intentional attack.

“We would really like to find the guy,” she said. “Do we expect it to happen? Not really, no. But we don’t want to keep going around thinking he can just attack the people who are providing the magic and the wonder — the whole point of events like this.”

Landin has been a festival performer since the early ’90s; he came to Las Vegas in the early 2000s because of Cirque du Soleil, where he worked as a fire soloist for “O” in 2003 and 2004, he said.

“I’m trained in dealing with crowds,” he said. “There’s always someone trying to touch your butt or kick your stilts. But if you’re a professional, that’s not going to bother you one bit; your sense of balance is better than their idiocy.”

But in all his years of performing, Landin said he’s never experienced or witnessed an intentional attack.

“For him to just intuitively perform the right set of moves to completely injure me the most, it felt practiced,” he said.

Landin wasn’t supposed to work EDC this year; he was filling in for a friend, he said. But now, because of his injuries and rehabilitation, he can’t perform for the next few months — the height of festival season — when he and his wife earn 80 percent of their income.

“It’s a lot of lost income for one guy’s desire to ruin one night,” he said.

Landin is due for an appointment with a wrist specialist in the next few days, who will determine if he needs surgery. Healing will take about 12 weeks, followed by rehab, but even if he healed early, most of the events he’s scheduled to work this summer involve four-legged stilts, portraying animal characters, which require wrist strength.

“I am absolutely certain I won’t be able to do that,” he said.

A friend created a GoFundMe page to raise money to help with medical expenses and offset the couple’s projected income loss. As of Friday afternoon, it had raised more than $11,600.

“People have been really sweet,” Landin said. “We have such a tight-knit community of artists here in town.”

It’s unclear if Insomniac Productions will help or is obligated to help with expenses. A request for comment was not returned as of Friday evening.

“We’re just trying to cover all our bases,” his wife said.

Friends, strangers and DJs have posted about the incident on social media, Landin said, showing their support and spreading the word about the man responsible.

“It’s turned into a conversation bigger than just me,” Landin said. “It’s turned into a conversation about people’s attitudes at these festivals, with people being more aggressive, and how to combat that.”

He added that “there’s a lot of lovely people at EDC, but the larger an event is, there’s more potential for trouble.”

The festival saw 101 narcotics-related felony arrests this year, the most since EDC came to Las Vegas in 2011, though Metro noted that’s a small percentage of the more than 130,000 who attended each night.

Medical personnel responded to 617 medical calls, which were mostly minor. About 17 people were taken to local hospitals, including Landin.

Insomniac, which produces the event, and Metro initially reported no fatalities after the festival, but a 20-year-old woman was declared legally dead this week after she collapsed while waiting for a shuttle bus Monday morning. Her father said she died of heatstroke and dehydration.

Anyone with information about the man responsible for Landin’s attack or anyone who may have cellphone footage of the incident is asked to contact the Metropolitan Police Department or Crime Stoppers at 702-385-5555.

Contact Rachel Crosby at rcrosby@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290.