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A killer whale’s history of harming people was known among SeaWorld employees when the whale killed a trainer in Orlando two months ago, according to a police report released Wednesday.
The whale named Tilikum dragged trainer Dawn Brancheau underwater Feb. 24, thrashing her body with such force that her hair and scalp had to be retrieved separately from the bottom of a pool after other SeaWorld employees recovered her body.
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Tilikum’s past history is that when he obtains a person, he does not let them go,” are the words one detective used to paraphrase part of an interview with Laura Surovik, an assistant curator of animal training at Sea World.
The incident in Orlando marked the third time Tilikum had been involved in a human death. Tilikum was one of three orcas blamed for killing a trainer in 1991 after the woman lost her balance and fell in the pool at Sealand of the Pacific near Victoria, British Columbia.
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Tilikum also was also involved in a 1999 death, when the body of a man who had sneaked by SeaWorld Orlando security was found draped over him.
A spotter who worked with Brancheau, Lynne Schaber, told a detective she “knew Dawn Brancheau was in trouble” when she saw the trainer pulled into the water “because Tilikum is a ‘possessive’ animal,” the detective wrote.
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He normally keeps things that he has and will not release them,” the detective wrote. Craig Thomas, a SeaWorld animal trainer who worked with Tilikum in the mid-’90s and started working with him again in 2008, told a detective that “because of an incident in Canada,
there has never been any intention by any trainers of getting in the water with Tilikum.”