At approximately 3:40 p.m. on February 16, 2009, a 55-year-old woman named Charla Nash pulled into the driveway of her friend’s home in Stamford, Connecticut. She was holding a Tickle Me Elmo doll. Within seconds, the 200-pound chimpanzee who had treated her like family for years launched at her face with the full force of a wild animal. By the time police arrived, Nash had lost both hands, her nose, her lips, and her eyelids. She would never see again.
The chimpanzee’s name was Travis. For fourteen years, everyone who met him had assumed he was safe.
Born at a price
Travis was born on October 21, 1995, near Festus, Missouri, at a compound now known as the Missouri Chimpanzee Sanctuary. Sandra and Jerome Herold purchased him from the breeder for $50,000 when he was just three days old, separating him from his mother, Suzy. In 2001, Suzy escaped the sanctuary and was shot dead.
The Herolds named their new arrival after Travis Tritt, Sandra’s favorite country music singer. They raised him in their home on Rock Rimmon Road in North Stamford, where he was treated not as a pet but as a son. Jerome and Sandra brought him everywhere, to work at their towing company, shopping in town, on errands across Stamford. He was so well known and so apparently gentle that local police regarded him as a quirky but harmless fixture of neighborhood life. A neighbor, Tony Macari, wrestled with Travis regularly and recalled that the chimp always knew when to stop and followed instructions better than his own nephews.
In September 2000, Sandra’s only daughter, Suzan, was killed in a car accident. In April 2004, Jerome died of cancer. After those losses, Travis was all Sandra had left. She slept and bathed with him. After his death, she would tell reporters: “I’m, like, hollow now. He slept with me every night. Until you’ve eaten with a chimp and bathed with a chimp, you don’t know a chimp.”
Travis had quite a career
Travis was, by any measure, exceptional among chimpanzees. He could dress himself, brush his own teeth, use a key to open doors, log into the family computer to look at pictures, feed hay to the Herolds’ horses, eat at the table with the family, and drink wine from a stemmed glass. He watched baseball on television and changed channels with the remote control. He memorized the schedule of the local ice cream trucks. He drove a car on at least two occasions.
That level of socialization translated into a modest entertainment career. Travis appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola and Old Navy, made an appearance on The Maury Povich Show, and was featured in an unaired television pilot alongside Sheryl Crow and Michael Moore. He was also reported to have appeared on The Man Show. By any commercial standard, he had a more active career than most working actors.
Warning signs nobody heeded
Travis was not entirely without incident. On October 19, 2003, he was riding in the Herolds’ car in downtown Stamford when a pedestrian threw an empty soda bottle through the partially open window and struck him. Travis unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the car door, and gave chase. What followed was closer to farce than genuine alarm: police lured him back into the car multiple times with cookies, ice cream, and macadamia nuts, only for Travis to let himself out again once he had eaten his snack. He chased officers playfully around the car and held up traffic for several hours before a tranquilizer dart finally subdued him.
Nobody was injured. The incident was treated, as the state’s attorney would later note, as more of a nuisance than a genuine danger. Connecticut passed a law after 2003 banning primates over 50 pounds and requiring permits for exotic pet owners, but the Department of Environmental Protection exempted the Herolds because they had owned Travis for so long.
Then, in October 2008, four months before the attack, state biologist Elaine Hinsch sent a memo to the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection calling Travis “an accident waiting to happen.” Nothing was done.
The day Travis snapped
On the afternoon of February 16, 2009, Travis took Sandra’s car keys and let himself out of the house. Sandra, then 71 and managing the towing business largely alone, called her friend and employee Charla Nash and asked her to come over and help coax him back inside. Nash was very familiar with Travis. She brought one of his favorite toys.
The moment Travis saw Nash in the driveway, he attacked. He was on her before she could react, biting and tearing at her face and hands with the full strength of a 200-pound adult male chimpanzee. Sandra did everything she could to stop him. She hit Travis with a shovel. Then she stabbed him with a butcher knife, an act she later described as feeling like putting the blade into her own body.
Neither intervention stopped the attack.
Sandra called 911. The recording captured Travis’s screams in the background as she begged for help. Paramedics arrived first but were unable to approach. When the first police cruiser reached the scene, Travis paused his attack and walked toward the vehicle, blood-drenched and apparently calm. He tried to open the passenger door. When he could not, he smashed a wing mirror. He then moved to the driver’s side and opened that door himself, at which point Officer Frank Chiafari fired several rounds at close range.
An adult male chimpanzee possesses roughly five to seven times the upper-body strength of a human. Travis did not die immediately. He turned and walked back to the house, where he succumbed to his wounds near his cage.
What Charla Nash survived
Nash’s injuries were among the most severe ever documented in a chimpanzee attack. She had lost both hands, her nose, her lips, her eyelids, and most of her scalp. Travis had broken nearly all the bones of her facial structure. She was blind. Hospital staff who treated her received counseling afterward.
Surgeons reattached her jaw. In 2011, Nash received the nation’s first full face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. The procedure was initially successful, though her transplanted hands had to be removed after she developed an infection. She remained without sight or the use of her hands. Nash appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and became a vocal advocate against the private ownership of chimpanzees. She reached a $4 million settlement with Sandra Herold’s estate. A subsequent $150 million lawsuit against the State of Connecticut, arguing that officials had ignored Hinsch’s warning memo four months before the attack, was ultimately unsuccessful.
Why it happened
No definitive explanation for Travis’s attack on Nash has ever been established.
Nash had recently changed her hairstyle. Travis may have failed to recognize her and reacted to a perceived stranger holding one of his favorite possessions. An autopsy also found Xanax in his system, and Sandra Herold confirmed she had given him Xanax-laced tea earlier that day in an attempt to calm him. In rare cases, benzodiazepines can trigger paradoxical reactions, including hallucinations, aggression, and mania.
There is also a simpler explanation. Travis was a wild animal. He had always been a wild animal. However close to human he seemed, he was not human, and no one who loved him had ever truly known what was happening inside him. Those around him had mistaken what he could do for evidence that what he was no longer applied.
Sandra Herold died on May 24, 2010, of a ruptured aortic aneurysm. She was 72. Travis’s cremated remains were interred in her casket.
