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.
“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 television shows; the actress Morgan Fairchild, who had appeared beside him, called his death a “sin.”
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But no one has heard Officer Chiafari’s story until now. 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 that outweighed him by 50 pounds, but also by images of the victim in the driveway.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/nyregion/25chimp.html?pagewanted=1&hp
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