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So the guy who shot the chimp has been traumatized and battling depression since the shooting.
Denied wkmns comp, has been in therapy.
Ck out the legislation his Senator has introduced:
<span style="font-style: italic">
<span style="color: #000099">"State Senator Andrew J. McDonald, a Stamford Democrat, has introduced legislation that would cover an officer’s compensation for mental or emotional impairment after killing an animal when under threat of deadly force."</span>
</span>
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<span style="font-size: 17pt">
<span style="font-weight: bold">
After Shooting Chimp, a Police Officer’s Descent</span></span>
By MICHAEL WILSON
Published: February 24, 2010
STAMFORD, Conn. — Everybody here knew Travis the Chimp, whose owners drove him around in a tow truck, and Police Officer Frank Chiafari, on the job for 25 years, remembered playing with him when their paths would cross.
Enlarge This Image
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Frank Chiafari, 53, a police officer in Stamford, Conn., said he was haunted by images of the chimp's attack. “I'd go to the mall and see women and imagine them without faces,” he said.
Enlarge This Image
“When I saw him, he was small and cute and friendly — he’d wave at you,” Officer Chiafari recalled. “Who would have ever thought when we were playing together, we’d have this incident 15 years later?”
It has been a little over a year since Travis, the 14-year-old, 200-pound pet of Sandra Herold, 71, mauled a family friend in Ms. Herold’s driveway. Officer Chiafari and another officer were the first to respond to Ms. Herold’s 911 call, and after the chimpanzee attacked his vehicle and opened the driver-side door in the driveway, Officer Chiafari fatally shot Travis.
The story and its sensational underpinnings — Travis lived like a human, eating steak and drinking wine and, when he became hostile the day of the attack, ingesting Xanax — swept the globe. Travis had appeared in Old Navy and Coca-Cola commercials and on television shows; the actress Morgan Fairchild, who had appeared beside him, called his death a “sin.”
The victim, Charla Nash, 56, survived. Her recovery from the attack — the chimp bit and clawed off her face and hands — was presented to the world via an episode of the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in November. She was blind, her features lost in a bulbous and livid pulp.
But until now, no one had heard Officer Chiafari’s story.
In an interview in Stamford police headquarters on Tuesday, Officer Chiafari, 53, a husband and a father of three, described that day and the crippling depression and anxiety that followed. He was haunted not just by the frightening encounter with the bloody and enraged chimp who outweighed him by 50 pounds, but also by images of the victim in the driveway.
“I’d go to the mall and see women and imagine them without faces,” he said.
Officer Chiafari required therapy but was denied a worker’s compensation claim. The reason was that harrowing episodes involving a person — shooting a suspect, for example — would be covered but similar encounters with animals were not.
His visits to a therapist were eventually covered by the City of Stamford after police and union officials became involved on his behalf, said Sgt. Joseph Kennedy, president of the Stamford Police Association.
State Senator Andrew J. McDonald, a Stamford Democrat, has introduced legislation that would cover an officer’s compensation for mental or emotional impairment after killing an animal when under threat of deadly force. Officer Chiafari plans to testify on Thursday at a General Assembly Committee on Labor and Public Employees hearing on behalf of the proposed legislation.
Officer Chiafari did not come to the job naturally. Raised in Queens, he moved to Connecticut in his late 20s after eight years working in Manhattan as an apprentice at a printer and as a store detective in Times Square — a job he said he hated. A singer-songwriter, he performed Beatles covers and original songs in clubs in Queens and on Long Island and at parties.
Nonetheless, he took the Stamford police test with a friend and passed; he joined the department in 1985. He still sings and continues to record covers and original songs. He regularly takes long walks to relax, and he loves animals. He had only once before fired his gun in the line of duty, to kill a deer that had been struck by a vehicle.
On Feb. 16, 2009, Officer Chiafari started his shift at 3 p.m., reporting his location with his police radio and stopping at a Starbucks for tea with another officer. Then the radio sounded.
“The call came over as ‘monkey attacking someone,’ ” he said. “At first it sounded humorous. Then they said, ‘Code 3’ — lights and sirens, get there fast.
“I could tell something was not right.”
The dispatcher became more urgent as the officers, in separate cars, sped to Ms. Herold’s house on Rock Rimmon Road. Officer Chiafari realized who the so-called monkey was: The Herold family owned a towing company that occasionally responded to police calls to move vehicles, and they would bring their pet chimp along. (“Travis loves cops,” Ms. Herold said in 1998.)
As Officer Chiafari drove, he thought, “Wait a minute, that’s Travis.”
He pulled up to the house and saw a lump of clothing in the driveway. “Then I realized it’s a human being,” he said. “It was all ripped apart.”
He parked to the right of the body, and the other officer parked on its left. Officer Chiafari’s car blocked the body from the front porch, where he saw Travis jumping up and down, in a “frenzy.”
“He starts bashing the passenger window,” he said. “I’m terrified. I see what he’s done to the victim.” He drew his pistol, but Ms. Herold, who had been hiding in a vehicle, emerged behind the chimp, entering his line of fire. He looked back at the victim. “She had no face, and there’s blood pulsating out. She’s bleeding out.” He holstered his gun.
Travis swatted the side-view mirror off the squad car “like it was butter,” Officer Chiafari said. As Officer Chiafari puzzled over how he could help the victim, Travis returned to the porch, then calmly walked around his car and approached the driver-side door.
“I forgot I had the door unlocked,” Officer Chiafari said. He had unlocked it to help Ms. Nash before the chimp distracted him. “He pulls the door open. Now we’re, like, face to face with each other. Our eyes met.”
There was blood all over the chimp, whose owner had stabbed him in the back with a butcher knife. The chimp seemed as surprised that he had opened the door as Officer Chiafari, who was pinned in his seat by a computer console and again drawing his pistol.
“He gave me a split second to react,” he said. “He shows his teeth, a snarl, and I see blood. I see his fangs. I just start to shoot.”
He said that he did not remember hearing the four shots and that the chimp had not seemed to react; he thought the gun had misfired. But then Travis screamed one last time and ambled away.
Officer Chiafari and paramedics, who had been waiting in their vehicles for the chimp to leave, rushed to the body on the ground. “She had no face,” he said. “Her hands are off. There are thumbs and fingers all over the place.” He called out to her. “I feel bad, but I was hoping she wasn’t conscious.”
But Ms. Nash reached out with the stumps of her arms and tried to grab the officer’s leg, a memory that was perhaps the worst for him from that day.
Travis had entered his home and died in his living quarters. Ms. Nash was rushed to a hospital. Officer Chiafari was, too, for shock, and then sent home, where he told his wife and three children — a 10-year-old girl and a teenage boy and girl — what had happened.
“The next morning, I crashed,” he said. “I’d always heard of post-traumatic stress. Tell you the truth, I don’t think I believed in it.”
He saw a therapist and told the story with great difficulty, remembering the chimp’s fingers — “like sausages” — smashing at his window and rocking the car. After the attack, he said, he could not wear a red shirt because it reminded him of blood. Everyone wanted to hear the story. His therapist told him to politely decline, which helped.
Officer Chiafari returned to work a month or so later. At first he could not drive down Rock Rimmon Road, until he forced himself to visit the fateful driveway and confront his fear.
People second-guessed him: “Why didn’t I wait for a stun gun? Why didn’t I talk to it?” He shook his head. “I can’t say, ‘Hey Travis, let’s wait for a stun gun.’ ” He believes shooting the chimp when he did saved Ms. Nash’s life by allowing paramedics to reach her.
Nonetheless, waves of panic and depression came and went. He was plagued by dreams of a faceless woman on a July family visit to Disney World that ruined his appetite and his vacation. Ms. Nash’s much-publicized “Oprah” visit, which he avoided watching, brought back painful memories. But he said he was feeling more and more like his old self.
“I’m a positive person,” he said, adding that he held open the possibility of meeting Ms. Nash someday — but not yet.
He has a sense of humor about his reaction to that day. “I’ll go to the store and my daughter will say, ‘Daddy, don’t look in the corner,’ and it’s a chimp in the corner,” he said with a laugh. He still avoids news coverage of the shooting and any shows about deadly chimps. “On TV, ‘When Animals Attack’ — I turn it off.”
So naturally, when the Animal Planet network asked if Officer Chiafari would participate in a re-enactment of the attack, he declined. Someone else played his part, and the episode is scheduled to be shown on March 28 as part of a series titled “Fatal Attractions.”
Travis dictated the events of that fatal day, but Officer Chiafari does not hold him responsible.
“I consider him a victim,” he said. “He should have been in the jungle where he’s supposed to be. Not in a house drinking wine and taking Xanax.”
Denied wkmns comp, has been in therapy.
Ck out the legislation his Senator has introduced:
<span style="font-style: italic">
<span style="color: #000099">"State Senator Andrew J. McDonald, a Stamford Democrat, has introduced legislation that would cover an officer’s compensation for mental or emotional impairment after killing an animal when under threat of deadly force."</span>
</span>
---
<span style="font-size: 17pt">
<span style="font-weight: bold">
After Shooting Chimp, a Police Officer’s Descent</span></span>
By MICHAEL WILSON
Published: February 24, 2010
STAMFORD, Conn. — Everybody here knew Travis the Chimp, whose owners drove him around in a tow truck, and Police Officer Frank Chiafari, on the job for 25 years, remembered playing with him when their paths would cross.
Enlarge This Image
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Frank Chiafari, 53, a police officer in Stamford, Conn., said he was haunted by images of the chimp's attack. “I'd go to the mall and see women and imagine them without faces,” he said.
Enlarge This Image
“When I saw him, he was small and cute and friendly — he’d wave at you,” Officer Chiafari recalled. “Who would have ever thought when we were playing together, we’d have this incident 15 years later?”
It has been a little over a year since Travis, the 14-year-old, 200-pound pet of Sandra Herold, 71, mauled a family friend in Ms. Herold’s driveway. Officer Chiafari and another officer were the first to respond to Ms. Herold’s 911 call, and after the chimpanzee attacked his vehicle and opened the driver-side door in the driveway, Officer Chiafari fatally shot Travis.
The story and its sensational underpinnings — Travis lived like a human, eating steak and drinking wine and, when he became hostile the day of the attack, ingesting Xanax — swept the globe. Travis had appeared in Old Navy and Coca-Cola commercials and on television shows; the actress Morgan Fairchild, who had appeared beside him, called his death a “sin.”
The victim, Charla Nash, 56, survived. Her recovery from the attack — the chimp bit and clawed off her face and hands — was presented to the world via an episode of the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in November. She was blind, her features lost in a bulbous and livid pulp.
But until now, no one had heard Officer Chiafari’s story.
In an interview in Stamford police headquarters on Tuesday, Officer Chiafari, 53, a husband and a father of three, described that day and the crippling depression and anxiety that followed. He was haunted not just by the frightening encounter with the bloody and enraged chimp who outweighed him by 50 pounds, but also by images of the victim in the driveway.
“I’d go to the mall and see women and imagine them without faces,” he said.
Officer Chiafari required therapy but was denied a worker’s compensation claim. The reason was that harrowing episodes involving a person — shooting a suspect, for example — would be covered but similar encounters with animals were not.
His visits to a therapist were eventually covered by the City of Stamford after police and union officials became involved on his behalf, said Sgt. Joseph Kennedy, president of the Stamford Police Association.
State Senator Andrew J. McDonald, a Stamford Democrat, has introduced legislation that would cover an officer’s compensation for mental or emotional impairment after killing an animal when under threat of deadly force. Officer Chiafari plans to testify on Thursday at a General Assembly Committee on Labor and Public Employees hearing on behalf of the proposed legislation.
Officer Chiafari did not come to the job naturally. Raised in Queens, he moved to Connecticut in his late 20s after eight years working in Manhattan as an apprentice at a printer and as a store detective in Times Square — a job he said he hated. A singer-songwriter, he performed Beatles covers and original songs in clubs in Queens and on Long Island and at parties.
Nonetheless, he took the Stamford police test with a friend and passed; he joined the department in 1985. He still sings and continues to record covers and original songs. He regularly takes long walks to relax, and he loves animals. He had only once before fired his gun in the line of duty, to kill a deer that had been struck by a vehicle.
On Feb. 16, 2009, Officer Chiafari started his shift at 3 p.m., reporting his location with his police radio and stopping at a Starbucks for tea with another officer. Then the radio sounded.
“The call came over as ‘monkey attacking someone,’ ” he said. “At first it sounded humorous. Then they said, ‘Code 3’ — lights and sirens, get there fast.
“I could tell something was not right.”
The dispatcher became more urgent as the officers, in separate cars, sped to Ms. Herold’s house on Rock Rimmon Road. Officer Chiafari realized who the so-called monkey was: The Herold family owned a towing company that occasionally responded to police calls to move vehicles, and they would bring their pet chimp along. (“Travis loves cops,” Ms. Herold said in 1998.)
As Officer Chiafari drove, he thought, “Wait a minute, that’s Travis.”
He pulled up to the house and saw a lump of clothing in the driveway. “Then I realized it’s a human being,” he said. “It was all ripped apart.”
He parked to the right of the body, and the other officer parked on its left. Officer Chiafari’s car blocked the body from the front porch, where he saw Travis jumping up and down, in a “frenzy.”
“He starts bashing the passenger window,” he said. “I’m terrified. I see what he’s done to the victim.” He drew his pistol, but Ms. Herold, who had been hiding in a vehicle, emerged behind the chimp, entering his line of fire. He looked back at the victim. “She had no face, and there’s blood pulsating out. She’s bleeding out.” He holstered his gun.
Travis swatted the side-view mirror off the squad car “like it was butter,” Officer Chiafari said. As Officer Chiafari puzzled over how he could help the victim, Travis returned to the porch, then calmly walked around his car and approached the driver-side door.
“I forgot I had the door unlocked,” Officer Chiafari said. He had unlocked it to help Ms. Nash before the chimp distracted him. “He pulls the door open. Now we’re, like, face to face with each other. Our eyes met.”
There was blood all over the chimp, whose owner had stabbed him in the back with a butcher knife. The chimp seemed as surprised that he had opened the door as Officer Chiafari, who was pinned in his seat by a computer console and again drawing his pistol.
“He gave me a split second to react,” he said. “He shows his teeth, a snarl, and I see blood. I see his fangs. I just start to shoot.”
He said that he did not remember hearing the four shots and that the chimp had not seemed to react; he thought the gun had misfired. But then Travis screamed one last time and ambled away.
Officer Chiafari and paramedics, who had been waiting in their vehicles for the chimp to leave, rushed to the body on the ground. “She had no face,” he said. “Her hands are off. There are thumbs and fingers all over the place.” He called out to her. “I feel bad, but I was hoping she wasn’t conscious.”
But Ms. Nash reached out with the stumps of her arms and tried to grab the officer’s leg, a memory that was perhaps the worst for him from that day.
Travis had entered his home and died in his living quarters. Ms. Nash was rushed to a hospital. Officer Chiafari was, too, for shock, and then sent home, where he told his wife and three children — a 10-year-old girl and a teenage boy and girl — what had happened.
“The next morning, I crashed,” he said. “I’d always heard of post-traumatic stress. Tell you the truth, I don’t think I believed in it.”
He saw a therapist and told the story with great difficulty, remembering the chimp’s fingers — “like sausages” — smashing at his window and rocking the car. After the attack, he said, he could not wear a red shirt because it reminded him of blood. Everyone wanted to hear the story. His therapist told him to politely decline, which helped.
Officer Chiafari returned to work a month or so later. At first he could not drive down Rock Rimmon Road, until he forced himself to visit the fateful driveway and confront his fear.
People second-guessed him: “Why didn’t I wait for a stun gun? Why didn’t I talk to it?” He shook his head. “I can’t say, ‘Hey Travis, let’s wait for a stun gun.’ ” He believes shooting the chimp when he did saved Ms. Nash’s life by allowing paramedics to reach her.
Nonetheless, waves of panic and depression came and went. He was plagued by dreams of a faceless woman on a July family visit to Disney World that ruined his appetite and his vacation. Ms. Nash’s much-publicized “Oprah” visit, which he avoided watching, brought back painful memories. But he said he was feeling more and more like his old self.
“I’m a positive person,” he said, adding that he held open the possibility of meeting Ms. Nash someday — but not yet.
He has a sense of humor about his reaction to that day. “I’ll go to the store and my daughter will say, ‘Daddy, don’t look in the corner,’ and it’s a chimp in the corner,” he said with a laugh. He still avoids news coverage of the shooting and any shows about deadly chimps. “On TV, ‘When Animals Attack’ — I turn it off.”
So naturally, when the Animal Planet network asked if Officer Chiafari would participate in a re-enactment of the attack, he declined. Someone else played his part, and the episode is scheduled to be shown on March 28 as part of a series titled “Fatal Attractions.”
Travis dictated the events of that fatal day, but Officer Chiafari does not hold him responsible.
“I consider him a victim,” he said. “He should have been in the jungle where he’s supposed to be. Not in a house drinking wine and taking Xanax.”
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