Travis, the chimpanzee who disfigured a woman

Travis was a chimpanzee who on February 16, 2009 attacked a woman, Charla Nash, who suffered horrific injuries to her face and hands, leaving her completely disfigured and blind.

Travis the chimpanzee

Travis was born on October 21, 1995 near Festus, Missouri, at a compound that bred chimpanzees, the son of two chimpanzees captured in Africa. Sandra and Jerome Herold bought him for $50,000 when he was just three days old, after he had been taken from his mother. They named him after Sandra’s favorite singer, Travis Tritt.

From then on they treated him as a member of the family, at their home in Stamford, Connecticut.

The couple owned a towing company and Travis often went to work with them. He sat in the tow truck with his seat belt buckled, wearing a baseball shirt, and greeted the police officers they met. He also went shopping with them and was known to everyone in town.

He is said to have appeared as a youngster in some commercials, for example for Pepsi, and on some TV shows, although it is not certain that it was really him.

Having grown up among humans, Travis was very sociable. A neighbor recalled that he played and wrestled with him, always knew when to stop and “listened better than my nephews”.

Travis was very intelligent: he could open doors with keys, dress himself, water the plants, feed hay to Jerome and Sandra’s horses and eat at the table with the family.

He was also so fond of ice cream that he learned the schedules of the ice cream trucks. He logged onto the computer to look at pictures, watched television using the remote, especially baseball, and brushed his teeth. He weighed 200 pounds (91 kg), significantly obese for a chimpanzee.

Perhaps, though, his owners went too far in treating him as a member of the family. They let him drink wine from a stemmed glass and on a few occasions they let him drive the car. However sociable he was, Travis was still a wild animal.

In 2000 Sandra’s daughter, Suzan, was killed in a car accident and in 2004 Jerome died of cancer. From then on Sandra saw Travis almost as a son, sleeping and bathing with him.

The 2003 incident

The attack on Charla Nash happened in 2009, but there had already been an incident in 2003. On October 19, 2003 Travis was in the car with Sandra, stopped at a red light, when a pedestrian threw an empty bottle at the car. The window on Travis’s side was partly open and the bottle hit him, startling him.

The chimpanzee unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the car, chasing the man who had thrown the bottle.

Luckily he didn’t catch him, but he was on the loose for several hours, holding up traffic. When police arrived, officers managed several times to get him back in the car, but he would let himself out of another door and sometimes chase them around the car.

This incident led to a law banning, in Connecticut, the keeping as pets of primates weighing more than 50 pounds (23 kg) and requiring owners of exotic animals to apply for a permit.

The law, however, was not applied to Travis’s owners because he had lived with them for many years and the authorities did not think he was dangerous, even though he weighed 200 pounds.

Unfortunately this choice had terrible consequences for Charla Nash.

The 2009 attack on Charla Nash

On February 16, 2009, at around 3:40 pm, Travis took Sandra’s car keys and left the house. Sandra asked her friend Charla Nash, 55, to help get him back inside. Travis knew Charla well, as she had worked at the family company, but that day she had a different hairstyle and a different car, which may have confused and alarmed him.

When the chimpanzee saw Charla holding an Elmo doll, one of his favorite toys, he flew into a rage and attacked her savagely, biting and clawing her face and hands. That day Sandra had given him tea laced with Xanax, and Travis was also on medication for Lyme disease.

Sandra, who was 70 at the time, tried to stop Travis. First she beat him over the head with a shovel and then stabbed him in the back with a butcher knife.

Sandra later said:

For me to do something like that, put a knife in him, was like putting one in myself.

She also said that Travis, after being stabbed, turned around as if to say, “Mom, what did you do?” Believing Charla was dead, Sandra ran to her car, locked herself inside and called 911. At first the dispatcher thought it was a hoax, but changed his mind when Sandra cried:

He’s eating her!

Paramedics arrived but waited for the police before approaching the house.

Travis’s death and Charla’s injuries

When police arrived, Travis went toward one of the cars, tried to open a locked door and smashed a side-view mirror. Then he went to the driver’s door and opened it, and at that point officer Frank Chiafari shot him four times with his service pistol. Travis retreated into the house, where he was found dead next to his cage.

Paramedics described Charla’s injuries as “horrendous”. Over the following 72 hours she underwent more than 7 hours of surgery on her face and hands by 4 teams of surgeons, and the hospital had to offer counseling to the staff who first treated her.

Charla lost her eyelids, nose, lips, the bone structure of her mid-face and nine fingers. Doctors removed Travis’s hair and teeth from her bones and reattached her jaw.

On April 7, 2009 doctors announced that Charla would be blind for life, due to infection in both eyes. Her family started a fund to pay her medical bills, and Charla revealed her face in public for the first time on November 11, 2009, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”.

On May 28, 2011 Charla received a face and hand transplant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The face transplant succeeded, but a few days later, because of pneumonia and poor circulation, doctors had to remove the hands.

The examination of Travis’s body

Travis’s body was examined: he did not have rabies, but he was overweight and his system contained the Xanax Sandra had given him in his tea.

Xanax is an anti-anxiety drug used for anxiety and panic attacks, but its rare side effects include disorientation, aggression and rage.

After the attack a woman claimed that in 1996 Travis had bitten her hand and tried to pull her into a car, and a man said that in 1998 he had bitten his hand. Police, however, had no record of any complaints.

The lawsuits and Sandra’s death

Charla sued Sandra for $50 million. The defense argued that Travis had never been violent and had been provoked. Sandra, devastated both for her friend and by the loss of Travis, died suddenly on May 24, 2010, aged 72, of a ruptured aortic aneurysm. Her lawyer said her heart, “broken so many times before”, could take no more.

In November 2012 Charla settled with Sandra’s estate and received about $4 million. In 2013 she also tried to sue the State of Connecticut, accusing officials of knowing Travis was dangerous, but her claim was denied because at the time no law prohibited owning a chimpanzee, and her appeal was also denied in 2014.

The case sparked worldwide debate about keeping exotic animals at home. A bill to ban the trade in primates as pets has been introduced several times in the U.S. Congress, so far without success.

Sources

• Travis (chimpanzee) – Wikipedia