This tiger homicide story has made national news and all, but the details are still amazing. I’ve had a bit of a tiger obsession since I covered a small part of the story of the man who raised a tiger in Harlem in 2003. The short version of the tale is that on Christmas day, a tiger leapt the wall of its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo to attack Carlos Sousa Jr., 17, and his two buddies, Kulbir and Paul Dhaliwal, 23 and 19 respectively. Here’s a run down of the facts culled from multiple news sources:
* The tiger, Tatiana, is 4-year-old, 350-pound Siberian tiger with a nasty reputation.
• Tatiana leapt out of the cage to attack one brother Kulbir. Sousa yelled at the tiger to distract it, and ended up getting mauled himself.
• The two brothers abandoned Sousa and fled to the cafe. To quote the Associated Press, “After killing the teenager, the tiger followed a trail of blood left by Kulbir Dhaliwal about 300 yards to the cafe, where it mauled both men, police said. “
• Police responded to the cafe, where they found Tatiana sitting next to one of the well-clawed brothers. When the brother yelled “help me, help me!” the tiger started attacking him again. (Note to victims of tiger attacks: Play dead. Zoo tigers will not eat you, since they are well fed. But they like to make sure their victims are deceased.)
• The police distracted the tiger with flood lights, and then they gunned it down.
• Police found a shoe print on the bars of the fence outside enclosure. They’re looking to see if it matches any of the victims’ shoes. The San Francisco police chief, Heather Fong, denied rumors of a bloody shoe found inside the enclosure. Tigers don’t generally attack if hungry. It seems likely the victims were doing something to provoke her, especially since she followed them through a crowd of zoo patrons after she escaped.
• The Dhaliwal brothers have both been arrested in the last year for being drunk and high in public. Both men resisted arrest at the zoo scene, but I haven’t seen anything about whether they were sober at the time.
• The tiger is also no innocent abroad. Last December she mauled a zoo keeper.
• The wall of the enclosure was four feet lower than national zoo standards, at only 12.5 feet, but tiger experts quoted in newspaper accounts are generally surprised that Tatiana managed to vault the 25-foot moat and still clear the fence.
• The San Francisco Zoo director, Manuel Mollinedo, has a bad record for animal escapes. When he ran the Los Angeles Zoo, there were 12 escapes including a gorilla and a snow leopard.
As for me, I take the long view. Can you imagine, 10 years from now, being Sousa’s mom and having to tell people about how your son was killed by a tiger? I think people will laugh and ask her how he really died. I mean, who gets killed by a tiger?
