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[Josh Greenman <josh.greenman AT gmail.com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/nyregion/25chimp.html?src=twr&pagewanted=print

February 24, 2010

After Travis the Chimp, a Police Officer’s Descent

By MICHAEL WILSON

STAMFORD, Conn. — Everybody here knew Travis the Chimp, whose owners
drove him around in a tow truck and walked him around, 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.“

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 “Oprah Winfrey Show” in November. She was blind, her
features lost in a bulbous and livid pulp.

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 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.

“I’d go to the mall and see women and imagine them without faces,” he
said. He required therapy, but was denied a worker’s compensation
claim. The reason: harrowing episodes involving a person — shooting a
suspect, for example — would be covered; 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 Officer
Chiafari’s behalf, said Sgt. Joseph Kennedy, president of the Stamford
Police Association.

State Senator Andrew J. McDonald 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, and Officer
Chiafari plans to testify on Thursday at a General Assembly Labor
Committee 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
Long Island and at parties.

Nonetheless, he took the Stamford police test with a friend and
passed, and 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. 19, 2009, he 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,’ ” Officer Chiafari
said. “At first it sounded humorous. Then they said, ‘Code Three’ —
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.

“Wait a minute, that’s Travis,” he said he recalled thinking as he drove.

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 he 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 he doesn’t remember hearing the four shots, and that the chimp
didn’t seem to react, and 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. Her hands are off. There are thumbs and fingers all
over the place,” he said. 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 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 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 couldn’t wear a red
shirt because it reminded him of blood, he said. Everyone wanted to
hear the story. His therapist told him to politely decline, which
helped.

He returned to work a month or so later. At first he couldn’t 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 is feeling more and more like his old
self.

“I’m a positive person,” he said, adding that he holds 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 air 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.”