I was off that day and I came in, and at that time, you could drive right into the center of the zoo and park. And I drove in, there’s an ambulance, there’s Scott’s squad cars up at the top of the hill at the Lion House and I saw one of the keepers come out of the rep, I said, “What in the world’s going on over there?” And he said, “A girl just got killed by lion.” And I said, “My God,” I got back in my car and went home. And it did have a huge impact on the zoo, positively actually, even though it was a really tragic death. But Reed was able to go to Congress and say that the reason this happened was because the zoo had deteriorated to such a point that the guardrails were not ample and there was always an issue as to whether that child slipped through the bars of the guardrail or was placed over the bars. And from the witnesses’ accounts, the grandfather very likely put her over the railing and she went up to the bars of the cage and the cat grabbed her. But I remember talking to the then curator of birds and he had to go in there to retrieve the body. And it was just, it was horrible, it really was, it was a horrible, horrible accident. And so what Reed was able to do was to get Congress to understand that the zoo had deteriorated over a period of over 20 years.
