SAN JOSE, Calif. — The morning of Carlos Sousa Jr.’s funeral Mass, his mother telephoned Carlos’ best friend, Paul Dhaliwal, and implored him to call her.
She wanted to know what real ly happened at the San Francisco Zoo when her son was killed by a Siberian tiger and Dhaliwal and his older brother were mauled.
For the first time since the Christmas Day attack, the 19- year-old called her back, crying.
“How did it happen?” Marilza Sousa asked, her Portuguese accent thick.
It was quick, Dhaliwal said.
“Did you stick anything through the fence or taunt the tiger?” Sousa asked him.
“No,” he told her. “We never tried to taunt the animal. We were talking, laughing, walking, nothing else.”
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Sousa recounted the dramatic and heart-wrenching conversation she had with Dhaliwal — an account that at least one zoo spokesman is not quick to believe.
In the five-minute call, Dhaliwal laid it out for her: While the three of them were talking and laughing, he said, the tiger sprang over the fence, attacking him first — not his 23-year-old brother, Kulbir, as has been reported — and ripping a long gash across his skull.
Carlos Sousa and Kulbir Dhaliwal were waving their arms to distract the tiger, Tatiana, when it turned on Sousa and “just grabbed him,” Paul Dhaliwal told Marilza Sousa. “The mouth of the tiger just opened and got the neck,” he said, “and killed him right there.”
That’s apparently when the brothers ran to the gift shop, about 300 yards away.
“He said he’s bleeding and screaming and there’s no one to help,” Sousa recounted.
Dhaliwal started crying on the phone again.
“All this is inside my heart,” Dhaliwal told her, “and I can’t sleep or close my eyes.”
“He said he wished it was him” who was killed, Sousa said, because the images replaying in his head are “harder than to be dead.”
“OK, Paul,” she told him. “I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want to know any more.”
Sam Singer, who was hired as zoo spokesman after the attack, seemed skeptical of Dhaliwal’s denial of taunting, saying, “If that’s what he told Mrs. Sousa, that’s what he told Mrs. Sousa.”
In the 70-year history of the San Francisco Zoo, he said, what happened on Christmas Day was so unusual that “to our knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before. Animal experts have said as well it’s unusual for an animal to leave its enclosure unless it has been provoked.”
The San Francisco police are still investigating the incident.
“A large rock, pine cones and other things that wouldn’t normally have been in Tatiana’s or the big cats’ enclosure have been turned over to police to investigate as part of what might have happened,” Singer said. “Everybody — the zoo, the police, the press, the public, the boys’ attorney — everybody would like to know what happened.”
