Chiafari and other Stamford police officers traveled to Hartford Thursday to testify in front of the legislature's labor committee on a bill filed by state Sen. Chiafari has been denied workers' compensation because he shot and killed an animal, not a human being. After maintaining public silence since the attack, Chiafari is speaking now to support changes in the state's workers' compensation laws. She has been hospitalized for more than a year and has been unable to receive a face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic. Nash survived, but she was horribly disfigured by the animal, which had ripped off her hands, nose, lips and eyelids. "With a snarl, he was saying, 'You're next.' Thankfully, I got the gun out of the holster and shot." Chiafari said he fired four times, causing the chimp to retreat from the patrol car and eventually die on the property of his owner, 71-year-old Sandra Herold. It came in my car, and I felt him brush against me," he told reporters at the state Capitol complex in Hartford. Chiafari was virtually face to face with "a monster," he said Thursday - a chimp weighing 200 pounds "with fangs and blood all over his hands and face from just eating this poor woman, in a frenzy, banging on my car - knocking the rearview mirror off like butter." "The thing touched me. The officer said he had unlocked his door in hopes of reaching Nash, but the chimp suddenly jerked the driver's side door open. As Chiafari positioned his patrol car to try to help the woman, Travis started attacking the vehicle. He had been called to a horrific scene in Stamford a year ago after a frenzied chimpanzee named Travis mauled 56-year-old Charla Nash and left her fighting for her life on the ground. Her sons were the only ones that really didn’t attack the body aggressively,” Pruetz says, adding that Mamadou even tried to wake his old partner.Police Officer Frank Chiafari feared for his life as he faced a wild animal - an out-of-control "monster" that came surging toward him. The female that cannibalised the body the most, she’s the mother of the top two high-ranking males. These were likely to have been caused by chimps clamping them in their teeth to stretch his arms out and hold him down during the attack, says Pruetz.Īfter his death, the gang continued to abuse Foudouko’s body, throwing rocks and poking it with sticks, breaking its limbs, biting it and eventually eating some of the flesh. Pruetz says Foudouko probably died of internal injuries or bled out from his foot wound.įoudouko also had wounds on his fingers. He also had a large gash in his back and a ripped anus. At dawn, they found Foudouko dead, bleeding profusely from a bite to his right foot. “He was trying to come back in at a high rank, which was ultimately a foolish thing to do on his part.” Going apeĮarly one morning, Pruetz and her team heard loud screams and hoots from the chimps’ nearby sleep nest. “We just happened to have at the time five young males all coming up in the hierarchy and those guys together didn’t want to let Foudouko back in,” says Pruetz. They accepted Foudouko back into the fold, although other members of the group still chased him off periodically. By 2013, Mamadou had regained beta male status and his brother, David, had taken over as alpha. He lived alone on the outskirts of chimp society for years, only being observed by researchers in the field once or twice a year.Ĭhimpanzee groups at Fongoli are fairly isolated, so Foudouko’s only chance of finding a mate was to rejoin the group. In 2007, Mamadou was severely injured and separated from the group for weeks, returning frail and holding a lower rank in the social hierarchy.īecause Foudouko maintained an alliance with his now-weak partner, he was ostracised and then ousted by the others. As alpha male, he was “somewhat of a tyrant”, Pruetz says.įoudouko gained alpha status in his late teens and ruled alongside his right-hand chimp, Mamadou, the group’s beta male. Thirteen years ago, Foudouko reigned over one of the chimp clans at the Fongoli study site, part of the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project. In Senegal, female chimpanzees are poached to provide infants for the pet trade. She suggests that human influence may have caused this skewed gender ratio that is likely to have been behind this attack. Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University, who has been studying this group of chimpanzees in south-eastern Senegal since 2001, agrees. That seems to be a key factor here,” says Wilson. “When you reverse that and have almost two males per every female - that really intensifies the competition for reproduction.
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