Dispaches From The Planet of the Apes....

Back when my granddad bought this place, North Stamford was considered the backwoods, with dirt roads and a pretty sparse population. Gentrification has pushed out alot of the original old timers but we still have our share of oddballs. Now, I may be one myself, in the new order, because I keep chickens, but that's not the kind of thing that would rate as all that odd up here in the detritus of family places sitting on overgrown prime land and the secrets therein. Its not unusual for specially licensed professionals to keep exotic animals in their homes, but its a little unusual that a troublesome 200 lb Chimp was allowed to remain in what had become a populated residential area.

Travis the chimp was not the cute little guy in the Old Navy commercials anymore. He was not that little guy in diapers driving around town in the company truck... and Sandra Herold was not an animal handler by any stretch. Herold is an eccentric who had managed to grandfather in the ability to keep this wild and increasingly unmanageable animal under wraps and perhaps illegally in her residence. Travis was a disaster waiting to happen, and with his ability to get out of cars, stop traffic, drive cars himself, not to mention his threatening actions, its a wonder that only one person was so severely injured. When Travis stopped downtown traffic for 2 hours last year, it was a warning that things were out of hand. If what happened here on Tuesday had happened downtown, there could have been a much higher death toll.

Whatever was going on with Travis on Tuesday morning that caused Herold to call her friend Charla Nash to help her get the animal inside, is unclear. Sandra Herold has already given him an unprescribed dose of Xanax in tea to try to calm him and get him into the house, (Xanax has not been tested on Chimpanzees.) What is clear, from the reports of the first responders, is that Nash got out of her car with a doll for Travis and he attacked. As those first responders pulled up the drive, Travis appeared with blood dripping from his mouth and down his chest. He raised his arms like a gorilla, running back and forth between threatening the approaching rescuers and what looked like a crumpled mannequin on the lawn, but was actually Nash, continuing to chew her face some more as if she was his kill and they were threatening it.

She didn't even look like an actual person because she basically had no face, no scalp....The responders retreated, backing their truck away, because they knew that Travis could tear the door off their truck and there was no way for them to get to Nash until police sharp shooters arrived. When police approached the scene, Travis partially tore the door off their cruiser, causing an officer to begin shooting him with his .45. It took 5 shots to get Travis to retreat into his house, where he fell to the floor and died. Rescue workers were able to get Nash to the hospital where she remains in critical condition, but those on the scene can't imagine how she can live through the injuries she sustained. Bits of her were left on the lawn there along with the doll she brought to try to calm him.

This morning Sandra Herold was all over the news, giving interviews telling us that Travis looked up to her as if to say "Mom, what did you do?" What did she do? Well, that's an interesting question. She certainly didn't keep Travis in a proper enclosure. She certainly didn't think of her neighbor's safety, including the many young mothers in this neighborhood pushing baby carriages along the roads. She also didn't seem to be at the hospital outside of her "best friend's" room, waiting for word on her condition. Perhaps she has been told to stay away, but honestly, to use this time to make excuses for a wild animal behaving the way that many, many mature male chimpanzees behave, is insane.

Its not that Herold is considered to be a particularly sane person around here, anyway. Maybe she is just negligent and the city is to blame, but I for one, would like some answers. I have a teen who is outside quite a bit, and taking walks on these same roads with his friends, and I'd like to know that any dangerous animals are kept responsibly and that they are visited by the inspector from time to time. This monkey was allowed to drive around in a company truck when he was young, but by the time he has grown to over 200 lbs and was being kept by a disheveled woman (who was alone after having lost her husband,) living in a chaotic house, I would like to know that someone has a handle on things.

Back when I lived in Montana, I met a guy, Doug Seus, who raised and trained Bart the Bear, of The Bear fame (among other movies.) Yes, he was a cuddly animal, and the trainers that worked with him all the time could hug him and cuddle with him like he was a puppy. But he was also, like the many other wild animals that Doug raised and trained for show business, a wild animal. There were always handlers present, and one of my roommates back then had actually been a handler for Doug when Bart was a baby, (that's how I met him,) because one person couldn't possibly keep up with the training at all times. One person cant possibly keep up with the care and training of a wild animal! Older Chimpanzees become erratic


According to the Jane Goodall Institute:

Aggression is a natural aspect of chimpanzee behavior and it is not uncommon for chimps to bite each other in the wild. Even the best cared for chimpanzee innately misses the companionship of other chimpanzees and may act aggressively towards owners. However much a misguided chimp owner continues to love his or her "child," the chimpanzee will be too dangerous to keep as part of the family. Many owners, to delay the inevitable day that the chimp will have to be removed from the house, will pull the chimp's teeth, put on shock collars — even remove thumbs in the mistaken notion that this will make it impossible for the chimp to climb the drapes.

This morning on the Today Show a couple was interviewed who survived a Chimpanzee attack. This is a responsible couple who wished dearly that they could have kept their Chimp, but who put him in a facility when he got older. They were attacked at the facility while visiting by other chimps who had gotten loose. As kind as they are about Chimps in general, and as gracious as they are in saying that they sorely wish they could have one living with them so as to study it, the injuries speak for themselves. This guy isn't even done with the surgeries and care he needs. He threw himself in front of his wife, apparently and saved her.

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Heaven knows that I am an animal person who has been known to have a menagerie of pets that some people wouldn't want. The city was quick to sue me for a noise complaint from a disgruntled neighbor who was trying to sell his house and who had left by the time we went to trial. I won the suit, but had remedied the temporary problem, (too many roosters here from a clutch of eggs,) much earlier, anyway. Still the machinery of the process for noise complaints went into action, and once it was moving, lets just say that I became very familiar with the health department and the courts (and all is fine with my set up, thank-you-very-much.) How is it possible that a city like Stamford could be so remiss in protecting its citizens, even after incidents pointed to the out of control nature of the situation?

Charla Nash lost her face, her hands, and maybe her life. Mothers pushing baby carriages in neighborhoods of million dollar houses who used to worry about the odd frightened coyote up here, have to now worry about what else is behind those overgrown patches here and there. I'd like to know what Mayor Malloy intends to do to assure us that animal control and the department of health has permits and knowledge of all exotics residing in this quickly growing area before we have another tragedy.

Update:
I skipped over the part where the state had allowed Travis to be grandfathered in after permitting laws for exotic pets were passed in 2004. This family had Travis since 1994, which was all the more reason for a permit to be required in 2004, considering what is basic common knowledge about Chimpanzees. In other words, you don't need a PhD in primate psychology to know that they become aggressive. It might have been helpful if some animal regulating body was overseeing this thing. But with the apparent misunderstanding of the serious dangers to the public of keeping primates in substandard housing, I don't know if it would have made a difference.

The law enacted in 2004 exempted primates weighing less than 50 lbs, (as if a 50 lb monkey can't do some serious damage,) and those owned previously. Governor Rell now says that she is willing to consider an all out ban on owning primates as pets, but what seems to have fallen between the cracks here is that the primates that need looking at are the older ones that have been owned for a long time. Granted, no individual has applied for a large primate permit in the state since the law passed in 2004, but that doesn't mean that there aren't pre-existing primates out there that pose a danger. It would serve the entire country for animal control to require some sort of registration of primates, especially large ones. It would also serve to require that owners of these primates be licensed, and required to keep handy, animal tranquilizing darts.

c/p Brilliant at Breakfast

The Randomness of Tragedy; This is What Happened....

How did Sully "save" flight 549? Ask People Magazine, because we so clearly need a workaday hero in these unsure times. Sully is surely savvy enough to remain humble so that as the cycle wanes he will fade graciously. We eat our heroes as surely as we look for blame.
I was shocked in the days after the next crash, flight 3407, to read comments on the internets such as "Sully would have brought that plane home safely;" as if he is some sort of a god who could melt ice on wings with the power of thought. Maybe Tom Cruise can now that he has achieved superhero status in his church. Lets just let Sully write the book and get over it. Its time to move on to the next baby in a well.

If only the good thoughts of the superheros among us stopped the daily tragedies that come, maybe not more often these days, but with more clarity as we age and the real lack of a sense of reason sets in. Oh, I suppose that there is religion for guidance, and some purpose written on those walls and leaves by some early man struggling to make sense of the same fire pit that we all sit around ultimately, but to me, there is something much more stark, terrifying, and logical about the cycle of things with beginnings and ends, less the magic of living forever, and more as a cog in an ever turning wheel of this universe becoming whatever it will. The rest is just ego manifested to make the journey possible and even tolerable.

So one day; a day just like any other, as a human being and as a mother, I've come up against something that is just intolerable to me emotionally, physically, and logically. It defies explanation or reason...and its just plain cruel.Its not like shit doesn't happen every day, and its not like I don't have tragedy in my own backyard, with children losing both parents in short course, and 9-11 widows heading to heaven to be with their dead spouses via said plane crash, not to mention Chimps on the rampage, but a tragedy has touched me this week that involves someone young and new, though once removed from my direct life, who had promise and talent... and it gives me pause in the senselessness of all things...shaking the delicate order as if we lived in an ant colony, burying our dead...


On February 15th Gabriella Camejo, 22 years old and the daughter of the significant other of my father, Suzanne Camejo, was mowed down in Baltimore while returning from a night out with a friend. She was a student at the art institute there, and had just returned from a winter break trip home to see her mother, my father, and her friends. The pictures in this post are from that trip and a trip last summer (and belong to her mother Suzanne Camejo, so please don't steal them.) Little is known right now about the driver who hit the two of them when they stepped off the curb, except that she is in a mental ward for observation, (as we all might be considering the circumstances,) and the friend, a young man, was hardly hurt having been hit first but escaped with minor injuries. The trauma of him thrown against her or her being thrown in the air from that and hitting the pavement was too much for Gabriella's small frame. Its all being investigated still, and the boy, Kent is back home with his mother, leaving many questions still unanswered.

So now, less than 24 hours after a chilling midnight knock on the door from the sheriff in their California town, my father and Suzanne are traveling to get Gabriella, pack up her life at college, and drive her body back to the family compound in Tennessee to be buried. After that, all thats left is to try to make sense of the loss of a promising talent who was a nice and good person. The fact that she was also strikingly beautiful was probably more of a burden for her, as people assume so much about people from how they look, on both sides of the spectrum; she was just learning about the facts of that complex matter. She was a happy girl who had plans...a business plan, and plans for a life. What can I say? She loved her life, the beach, the many, many dogs that her mom was rescuing all the time, chihuahuas in particular, and her mom....she really loved her mom alot; they were two peas in a pod and they should have had more time together.

The very odd thing is that I didn't really know Gabriella. She was someone who might have been like a sister to me, in that we shared bits of a father across the space-time continuum, but since she was in LA and I'm on the east coast, she was young and I am twice her age, dealing with the matters of an extended family that its better that she never had to know the details of, we just didn't. Her mother, Suzanne, has this uncanny and sometimes annoying need to document everything she experiences in words and pictures and pass these things on to a huge mailing list of friends and family. So it happened that during the past 7 years I have watched this kid grow up from afar and through pictures, as my father taught her to drive and helped her with college visits and threw all of his spare resources into her. She didn't have much of a father in her birth father, and so he was able to fill in for whatever that can mean to a kid...its something. He hadn't been the greatest father to my sister and I...but that's another story from long ago....so, if the universe hands people second chances, I guess that Gabriella was his.

This is the sort of thing that makes you check your kids sleeping too late on winter break and thank whatever god there might be that the grace of randomness hasn't touched this home. You cant hold them too close, you have to let them go, knowing that anything can happen...anything, any time...Indeed, in the cruelest truth of this whole mess, Suzanne lost Gabriella's sister, Chantica, at 16, in a tragic car crash many, many years ago. This made Gabriella's role in Suzanne's life all the more important.
Its just sad...that's all...

Where is the blame? The college? They warn the kids all the time about Baltimore's terrible statistics on pedestrian vs. vehicle fatalities; every 100 minutes or so, there is one of these, elevating the trauma centers there to an elite level of care. There is so much more to say about a campus that is in a dangerous spot and yet does little to protect its students.

Maybe its a society that spends more energy on capitalism and the terrorism that it brings than infrastructure and law? The cronyism rampant in a city that uses its famous art institute as a selling point to bring in business, and yet turns its backs of the safety of the student who are the blood of that institute.

The boy? Kent? What were the details and shouldn't he have been "taking care of her?" who knows?...his personal tragedy will surely play out in its own time, as we weren't there and cant know his part one way or another (he has no memory of details, which is understandable, but I for one, am looking forward to when he regains his memory.)


Is it OK for the Baltimore metro area residents that as many as 5 pedestrians per day are killed by vehicles? From my quick survey of the top pedestrian danger zones and who the victims are, I can see that the issues range from cities where walking is the primary mode of transportation, to socioeconomic issues in that if you can't afford a car, you walk. Trends vary depending on what a metropolitan area does in response to specific trouble spots, and much can be done...but often, apparently its not. Gabriella was aware and careful, but we know that not many streets around the campus area are safe day or night, and beyond that, we can't know... that's part of whats so hard about this....



I hope that there is a heaven for random victims and all of the good and promising people lost to senselessness. I wish I had that comfort inside of myself, but for me its just not like that. All I can ever do is to take what happens and try to make it into something good in some way as the path becomes apparent. This is not my tragedy per se, its a loss to a world in need of good, strong kids to pull us out of the morass that we've sunk to.

RIP Gabriella, Godspeed

Gabriella Camejo
1/11/87 to 2/15/09


note: corrections added 02-23-09