The 911 call made by “gorilla mom”, Michelle Gregg, as she watched Harambe the gorilla wade towards 3-year-old Isaiah Dickerson, has now been released online.
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“The mother was standing next to a zoo exhibit and lost track of her child for perhaps a minute or so”, Ohio State University criminal law professor Ric Simmons told the Associated Press.
The breach, zoo Director Thane Maynard said, was the first time a visitor had entered its Gorilla World exhibit, which opened in 1978. The ruling cited other OH cases in which courts ruled that a mother who left her 9-year-old son in a locked auto at a shopping mall and a mom who left her toddler unattended in a bathtub for 30 seconds to 4 minutes to check on another child weren’t guilty of a crime. They also say she didn’t needlessly put the boy in danger by taking him to the zoo, and it could be argued that she surely trusted the zoo to have an enclosure that was childproof.
O’Connor and her niece shot the now-viral video of the startling Cincinnati Zoo incident that ended with the gorilla’s shooting death.
“[It’s] a bit like a fire drill”, she said.
“If anyone wishes to make a gift, we recommend a donation to the Cincinnati Zoo in Harambe’s name”, the family said in a statement distributed by Ms. Myers.
On Saturday, a special zoo response team shot and killed Harambe, a 17-year-old gorilla, that grabbed and dragged a 4-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla exhibit moat. “Deters will conclude his review would be Friday, June 3rd”.
One petition on change.org is asking officials to hold the parents “accountable for the lack of supervision and negligence that caused Harambe to lose his life”.
On Saturday, May 28, a four-year-old boy climbed over a three-foot barrier and into a moat surrounding a gorilla exhibit.
“The incident at the Cincinnati Zoo involving the young child who fell into the gorilla enclosure is under investigation by the Cincinnati Police Department”, Prosecutor Joseph T. Deters said in a statement, according to the Daily Mail.
Zoo officials have said that they could not take the risk that the gorilla might hurt the child in agitation, if hit with tranquilizer darts. The “good” parent like me would never take my eyes and hands off a slippery 3-year-old at a zoo, it says, in that self-soothing, illusion-of-control way. Twenty years ago, Binti drew national attention when she cradled a boy who had fallen into her enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo, near Chicago.
“He’s dragging my son”, she said. “I need to call his dad”, she tells the operator. “Humans always trump animals”.
The previous barrier passed multiple inspections by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and adhered to safety guidelines, the zoo said in a release.
As calls poured into the dispatch center, Cincinnati Fire Department began to dispatch to the scene.
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He also said that handlers could not have tranquillised Harambe because the animal would have become agitated for several minutes before he was knocked unconscious.
