A 12,300-pound killer whale — notorious for being “difficult, depressed and usually temperamental” — pulled a veteran trainer into a pool at SeaWorld in Florida yesterday, thrashing her around underwater in a deadly display that unfolded before horrified spectators.
Dawn Brancheau, 40, became the third human fatality attributed to the orca, Tilikum.
A spectator, Eldon Skaggs, said Brancheau was on a platform with the whale and was massaging him at the end of a midday show called “Dine with Shamu” — the stage name for SeaWorld’s killer whales.
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Skaggs said the interaction appeared leisurely and informal.
But suddenly, Tilikum “pulled her under and started swimming around with her,” he said.
Another spectator, Victoria Biniak, said the whale “took off really fast in the tank and he came back, shot up in the air, grabbed the trainer by the waist and started thrashing her around, and one of her shoes flew off.
“He was thrashing her around pretty good — it was violent,” she told WKMG-TV.
Despite the savage mauling, officials said the cause of death was drowning.
Skaggs said an alarm sounded and staff rushed the audience out of the stadium as workers scrambled around with nets. The Orlando theme park was later closed.
Brazilian tourist Joao Lucio DeCosta Sobrinho and his girlfriend were at an underwater viewing area at Shamu Stadium when they saw a whale with a person in its mouth.
The couple said they had watched the whale show at the park two days earlier and came back to take pictures.
Yesterday, they said, the whales were agitated.
“It was terrible. It’s very difficult to see the image,” Sobrinho said.
A black shroud could be seen covering what appeared to be a body lying on the concrete near the water as the animals swam just a few feet away.
SeaWorld General manager President Dan Brown lauded Brancheau as “one of our most experienced animal trainers.”
Skaggs said he’d heard during an earlier show that the monster orca, nicknamed Tilly, was not responding to directions.
And others at that show said some of the whales were being uncooperative.
“All of the sudden, out of nowhere, two of the bigger whales just kind of flipped out, going as fast as they could in the water,” spectator David Dalton told the TV station.
Mike Wald, a spokesman for the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration office in Atlanta, said that the tragedy is being probed and that his agency has dispatched an investigator from Tampa.
Later yesterday, SeaWorld in San Diego also suspended its orca show. It was not clear if the show has been suspended at SeaWorld’s San Antonio location, which is closed until the weekend.
WKMG broadcast a letter from the daughter of a former SeaWorld employee who described Tilikum as “notorious for being difficult, depressed and usually temperamental.”
The nearly 30-year-old Tilikum was involved in a drowning at a park called Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia in 1992. A 20-year-old trainer, Keltie Byrne, fell into a tank, and Tilikum and two other killer whales prevented her from surfacing.
Tilikum was shipped to SeaWorld in Orlando shortly after that incident.
In 1999, a 27-year-old South Carolina man entered a whale tank at SeaWorld Orlando after hours and drowned. Daniel Dukes, who was carrying false identification, was found dead with a bite below his waist, according to autopsy results. Authorities said he was bitten by Tilikum. Steve Huxter, who was head of Sealand of the Pacific’s animal care and training department in 1991, said yesterday he’s surprised it happened again.
Huxter said he considered Tilikum to be a well-behaved, balanced animal. According to a 2006 profile of Brancheau in the Orlando Sentinel, she was one of SeaWorld Orlando’s leading trainers. It was apparently a trip to SeaWorld at age 9 that made her want to follow that career path.
“I remember walking down the aisle [of Shamu Stadium] and telling my mom, ‘This is what I want to do,’ ” she said at the time.
Brancheau worked her way into a leadership role during her career with SeaWorld, starting at the Sea Lion & Otter Stadium before spending 10 years working with killer whales, the newspaper said.
She also addressed the dangers of the job in the article.
“You can’t put yourself in the water unless you trust them and they trust you,” Brancheau said.
There have been other attacks on orca trainers at SeaWorld parks. In November 2006, a trainer was bitten and held underwater several times by a killer whale during a show at SeaWorld’s San Diego park.
Miraculously, Kenneth Peters escaped with a broken foot. The 17-foot orca that attacked him was the dominant female of that park’s seven killer whales — and she’d attacked Peters two other times, in 1993 and 1999.
In 2004, another whale at the company’s San Antonio park tried to hit one of the trainers and attempted to bite him. He, too, escaped. With Post Wire Services