Posted on 01/04/2008 4:58:32 PM PST by repinwi
The two brothers injured in the Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo have refused to let police examine photos on their cell phones that authorities believe were taken the day they were mauled and their friend was killed.
< snip >
"We also understand that police officers requested permission from your clients to examine any images and other contents of the cell phone. Your clients refused to cooperate with this request; consequently, no one has yet examined this potentially critical evidence."
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Where did you get this?
” ... There has been lots of evidence that the zoo had failed for decades to keep their tiger in the pen. ...”
The police and the zoo have also retracted any comments claiming there was a shoe in the moat.
The also retracted comments regarding a boy ‘dangling their leg’ over the edge.
Yesterday they also retracted their comments claiming the boys had slingshots.
It has been one lie after the other.
The good news from this I guess is that all the zoos are taking 2nd looks and people should now be more aware that these animals are dangerous to humans. I know I'll think about it now when I go. If I see teasing I won't be shy about telling them to knock it off.
Has what been substantiated?
That the zoo failed to keep the tiger in the pen.
It has been mentioned that this particular tiger has gotten loose before but I have not read anything solid about it.
LE is allowed to lie if the actual victims/witnesses won’t tell them what happened. They are trying to piece together the true story. The investigation is *ongoing.* More will be revealed.
Wrong? Miller never said they taunted the tigers. She left in the middle of when they were taunting the lions, because they were scaring her kids. As to corroboration, she was the only one there at the lion exhibit at the time.
"They also could not substantiate Miller's claim that a fourth person was with the attack victims"
Who knows who that was? If it was a good buddy of the perps, it's not likely he'll volunteer himself up.
"what effect the taunting she described might have had."
Again, she eft, because they were scaring her kids. She also said Carlos was not taking part, and looked embarrassed at their behavior.
""I don't know if what they did was any more than what kindergartners do at the zoo every day," Inspector Valerie Matthews told the Chronicle."
She sounds like a real genius to me.
We can criticize these two boys for hiring a multimillion dollar lawyer.
But keep in mind these two boys probably don’t have $1000 in the bank. How could they possibly defend themselves against a zoo with a multimillion dollar budget or a city with a multiMULTImillion dollar budget when all they can afford is a pay-as-you-go neighborhood attorney?
I just read through the time line of the life of the zoo. Unless I missed it, it didn’t even mention when the tiger grotto was built. It appears that many areas of the zoo have been upgraded and paid special attention while nothing big was ever done for the big cats.
In 1997 San Franciscans voted for a $48 million bond to update the zoo. In 2001 they opened the first 3 majors projects built/updated with bond money. After that there’s no mention of anything more done with that money.
No this animal attack someone last year. There is a report that a retired zoo worker said that one had got out before and that they had put water in the moat till that cat died .
They’ve got *peek-churs*. And a story to sell.
What a crock. These “boys” don’t need a nickle. Any attorney knows that no matter what this is a win-win.
The punks are set for life.
Sad but true.
No tiger ever got out of the exhibit for 67 years. In the early 60’s they had a 13ft male that climbed up and was walking on the inside of the fence. They filled the moat with water while that large male was contained there. This female was ~8ft and never got out.
>>>Where did you get this?<<
” ... There has been lots of evidence that the zoo had failed for decades to keep their tiger in the pen. ...”
___________________________________________________________
SF Woman Warned Zoo 10 Years Ago Tiger Wall Not High Enough
POSTED: 11:56 am PST December 28, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO — A San Francisco woman has said she warned the city zoo more than 10 years ago that the safety walls at the tiger grotto weren’t high enough.
She said she was afraid for her safety and that of her 3-year-old 10 years ago.
“This whole image came back to me in my brain and I was sick to my stomach actually,” said Marian Roth-Cramer.
She says she saw a tiger, housed in the same grotto as Tatiana, the one that mauled three people this week, jump dangerously close to her little boy.
The animal left the yard, leapt crossed the moat, and got a paw up on the grassy area by the fence where the public stands.
“I saw the tiger leap off of that and disappear,” Roth-Cramer said. “Then I saw a paw on top of the grass, which was maybe 4 or 5 feet in front of my son.”
Roth-Cramer said she wrote a letter to the zoo, but never heard back.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1945827/posts
__________________________________________________________
Here are two more accounts of tigers jumping that moat:
****
But escaping from an enclosure at the zoo is not beyond the ability of a Siberian tiger, according to a retired longtime keeper and other zoo veterans interviewed by The Chronicle.
And many people who worked at the zoo knew it, the keeper said.
The keeper, who spent decades at the zoo and asked not to be publicly identified, said he got the word about Siberian tigers - and the apparently inadequate 12 1/2-foot-high moat wall that protects the public from them - in a most dramatic fashion, not long after he began working at the zoo.
“I was putting a sign up in front of the tiger exhibit, with my butt hanging over the edge,” said the former keeper. “The cat was pacing back and forth at the bottom of the grotto.”
The keeper said one of his more seasoned colleagues happened by, grabbed him by the belt loop and jerked him back, away from the edge.
“He shared the secret that people knew - the cat could jump up and take me down,” the keeper said.
And well known in zoo lore is the story about an entomologist who, as a teenage science student in the late 1950s, visited the tiger grotto with former zoo director Carey Baldwin to see if the enclosure was secure enough to contain the tiger.
“Mr. Baldwin had been told by one of the zookeepers that the tiger might be able to escape by jumping across the moat and onto the flowerbed between the public guard rail and the moat,” the entomologist, David Rentz, recalled in a posting on his Web log.
“We got a large piece of meat and tied it to a long bamboo pole and approached the tiger enclosure. We were at the other end of the bamboo pole - about 15 feet away from the meat. Baldwin held the pole at the edge of our side of the moat. Once the tiger saw it, he literally flew across the moat from his position on the other side, grabbed the meat, and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement.
“It happened so quickly that it was hard to believe what we had seen,” Rentz said Saturday in a telephone interview from his home in Queensland, Australia. “It scared the hell out of me. It scared the hell out of both of us.
“Then Mr. Baldwin closed the tiger’s access to the outside - supposedly forever,” Rentz wrote on his Web log.
****
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/29/MN00U6PR7.DTL&feed=rss.news
I haven’t read a retraction of the pine cones or the footprint anywhere. In any case I’m sure the animal was provoked.
If the cat got out, why did they put water in the moat? If it was out then what would water in the moat do???
If the car was in the moat, it was not out of the enclosure.
If you keep reading around, you’ll run across a report about a bunch of disgruntled former employees who are/were mad at this current zoo director. There are lots of stories there about all this stuff.
Probably no chance of being able to erase the pix when they were running for their lives!
see #175
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.