I live here in Cincy and go to the zoo. While I agree there are no winners in this situation I will place blame squarely on the parents who were not supervising their children properly.
The gorilla has been in that enclosure for years with the same fence and THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of guests visit the gorillas during the year and this one kid all of a sudden is Houdini and can get through a barrier that no other kid has before. The kid tells the mother he wants to go in the water down in the gorilla habitat and she repeatedly tells him no, i would be keeping an eye on my kid who i keep saying no to.
All was well until the crowd started to get riled up and that turned the gorilla into a defensive posture.
I can only hope this family slinks away and is not heard from again. Its bad enough that the kid will have the stigma of him being responsible for the gorilla death. If the family comes out with some lawyer and threatens to sue the Zoo then things will get very ugly.
Other kids do stupid things while their parents are otherwise occupied. They have four children; I don't know if all of them were along.
Only because this one possible/probable lapse in parental attention resulted in such a bad outcome for an endangered and loved gorilla are people getting so hysterical over it. I was outraged at first, too, and glad I waited for more details.
I don't know if it is true but a pretty girl saw the kid going in (it's not clear whether climbing through the bars or over it, she tried to grab him, but he was just too quick.
I thought that Jack sounded rambling,super hyper like he was on speed,made my head spin. The father is a career criminal,and Lord knows why the parents were not watching the child better. He was talking about wanting to swim with the Gorilla,that was a warning they should have heeded. The zoo left an access door open. Can you imagine if this kid lives to be an adult,and is told what happened how he will feel? So many mistakes,so many idiots,the inmates are running the asylum.