It’s been 8 years since Steve Irwin’s death and now Justin Lyons, one of the cameramen on his team, has given the first interview detailing the events surrounding the tragedy.
According to Lyons, he and Irwin went out on an inflatable raft to find something to film when they saw a “massive” stingray in chest-high water. They finished filming and wanted to get a final shot of it swimming away from Irwin. However, the stingray may have mistook Irwin’s shadow for a predator as it “propped on its front and started stabbing wildly, hundreds of strikes in a few seconds.”
“I panned with the camera as the stingray swam away and I didn’t know it had caused any damage. It was only when I panned the camera back that I saw Steve standing in a huge pool of blood.”
Contrary to reports, Irwin did not pull the barb out of his chest. “It’s a jagged barb and it went through his chest like hot butter.” He thought the stingray punctured a lung. “He had a two-inch-wide injury over his heart with blood and fluid coming out of it and we had to get him back to the boat as fast as we can. He obviously didn’t know it had punctured his heart … even if we had got him into an emergency ward at that moment we probably we wouldn’t have been able to save him.”
According to Lyons, he tried to get Steve to hang on. “I was saying to him things like ‘think of your kids Steve, hang on, hang on, hang on’, and he calmly looked up at me and said ‘I’m dying’ and that was the last thing he said.”
Because Irwin had a rule that the crew keep filming no matter what, the entire thing was caught on film. Lyons doesn’t know where the footage is now and says no one should ever see it. Just as well because I’m scared enough of the water as it is. Between getting bit by a great white, stepping on a sea urchin, being stung by jellyfish and getting caught in a riptide, I don’t need to add the visual of being stabbed in the chest a 100 times by a stingray.
Other crewmembers are reportedly pissed that Lyons publicly talked about this saying they can’t believe he’d do something like that.
Meanwhile, Bindi Irwin, Steve’s daughter, is getting slammed for supporting SeaWorld. She announced on Sunday that she’d be partnering with SeaWorld for a project called Generation Nature. SeaWorld, of course, is the subject of criticism in the documentary Blackfish, which, as I just learned, isn’t a Pixar film about a fish suffering racial discrimination in its school. I should probably pay more attention to these things.