Posted on 03/23/2004 11:33:53 AM PST by GulliverSwift
DALLAS - A zoo visitor saw two teen-age boys throwing rocks or ice at Jabari the gorilla shortly before he escaped from his exhibit Thursday and attacked three people at the Dallas Zoo, officials said Monday.
Mammal curator Ken Kaemmerer said the man told zoo officials that he warned the teens not to taunt the gorilla and was walking away from the exhibit when he heard someone yelling that the animal had escaped.
"He just ran," Kaemmerer said. "So he didn't see where the gorilla got out."
Officials said the information, which appears credible and came from a hot line created to collect information about the incident, is helpful because it shows what might have provoked Jabari's escape.
But it also left the zoo without a solid explanation of how the 13-year-old gorilla got past walls 12 to 16 feet high with moats and electrified wires. Jabari, who injured two women and a 3-year-old boy, was fatally shot by police after he charged at them.
"I'm thinking he just got angry enough at being harassed and he either made the climb of his life or a leap and got lucky," Kaemmerer said.
In a tape of one 911 call released by authorities Monday, a zoo secretary calmly tells the operator that police are needed. In another call, Dallas resident Enrique DeLeon urgently requests help.
"There's a gorilla loose, and it's going after people," he says frantically.
"Are you serious?" the dispatcher asks.
DeLeon responds, "I'm serious. I swear to God. I am not joking. There's people yelling. It's going after people. ... There's kids in here. Please. ... Please hurry up."
In an interview Monday, DeLeon said he and his family were near the meerkat exhibit when they heard banging and screams.
DeLeon said he first saw Cheryl Reichert, 39, trying to close a door to the aviary, but the gorilla forced it open and jumped on her. Then DeLeon saw Jabari go after 3-year-old Rivers Heard and his mother, Keisha Heard, 31.
"He picked him up like a rag doll and then bit him in the head," DeLeon said. "His mother started hitting the gorilla on the back, but that just made him more mad. He threw young Rivers and then turned around and attacked her."
DeLeon said he borrowed a utility knife from a young boy and began cutting the mesh netting of the aviary. The gorilla had left the area, and he told Heard to bring her son out that way.
"She was yelling, 'Hurry up! Hurry up!' But I told her she needed to be quiet or the gorilla would come back up," he said.
After they were pulled through the netting, a zoo employee armed with a fire extinguisher led them to a nearby barn, he said. DeLeon said he began administering first aid to Keisha Heard while DeLeon's wife, Andrea, attended to Rivers.
The paramedics arrived soon afterward, and then three gunshots were heard, DeLeon said.
"My wife and I tried to be calm through it, but once everything was over, we just started crying," he said. "It was just surreal, everything we saw."
Kaemmerer said he isn't sure whether the zoo will ever be able to figure out how Jabari escaped. He continued to urge witnesses to call the zoo's hot line at (214) 671-0888 and emphasized that officials are trying to figure out what happened, not assign blame.
"I would have hoped at this point either through the media or through the hot line we would have gotten something," he said. "What I'm afraid of is the people that saw this or caused this are afraid they're going to be liable."
Kaemmerer also responded to questions about why zoo officials with tranquilizer guns could not reach Jabari before he was shot by police armed with safari-style rifles that had been provided by the zoo.
At the time of the shooting, Kaemmerer said the zoo's immobilization team had not gone in to capture the gorilla because personnel were still focusing on the first phase of their emergency operation, which is securing zoogoers and evacuating the injured.
"The vet or immobilization team will come to our command post, but he doesn't go into action until after all public and staff members are safe and the injured people are removed," Kaemmerer said.
"Once we had gotten people out, then we would have gone into the phase of contain and capture," he said.
Kaemmerer said that ideally police and zoo officials would have coordinated their plans. But he said the police were probably responding to 911 calls about a raging gorilla.
"Unfortunately, the police encountered Jabari and he charged them, and they really had no choice," Kaemmerer said.
Zoo officials are awaiting the arrival of the Department of Agriculture's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, which will conduct its own investigation of the incident, before putting some of the gorillas back on exhibit.
Kaemmerer said he hopes to reopen the north portion of the gorilla exhibit before the weekend and display two older gorillas, Jenny and Fubo. Jabari was in the south portion of the exhibit when he escaped.
Well, guess this story is not finished yet; but yes, no one killed - can only imagine the trauma however of some of these people involved, however.
I am hoping that these teens bare less responsibility rather than more; but whatever the case, we all need to be vigilant against those who would abuse animals - anywhere; anytime.
Thanks. . .and good luck with that teenager!
Well, guess this story is not finished yet; but yes, no one killed - can only imagine the trauma however of some of these people involved, however.
I am hoping that these teens bare less responsibility rather than more; but whatever the case, we all need to be vigilant against those who would abuse animals - anywhere; anytime.
Thanks. . .and good luck with that teenager!
From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal's rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.
Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.
If the cops didnt have a dart gun they should have unloaded their lead to protect humans,if need be.
Didnt anyone see Planet of the Apes?!
I understand his relatives have hired Johnnie Cochran.
No! No! No! All wrong! We're talkin' a teen movie here. Where's the dork/brainy-ack? The stud/jock? The smarmy jerk who, when he gets ka-bonged to pieces by the gorilla, everybody in the audience cheers? And where are the teenage bimbos?? Cheeze, when are you rookies are goin' learn? (grin)
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