Video captures the horrifying moment a trainer at SeaWorld was grabbed by an orca and dragged to her death.
The trainer was Dawn Brancheau, who had dedicated about 16 years to working at SeaWorld, including time spent with the bull orca Tilikum, who became the focus of the 2013 Netflix documentary Blackfish.
Tilikum was a massive orca captured at just two years old.
Weighing approximately 12,500 pounds, Tilikum had sired several calves at SeaWorld.
At the time of the incident involving Dawn, Tilikum had already been connected to the deaths of two others.
The first victim was 20-year-old Keltie Lee Byrne, who died at Sealand of the Pacific in 1991 after slipping into a tank with three orcas, including Tilikum.
In 1999, 27-year-old Daniel P. Dukes became the second person to die due to Tilikum.
Daniel had stayed in the park after it closed, and his body was discovered in the whale enclosure, mutilated by Tilikum.
Following Daniel’s death, Tilikum was deemed too dangerous for trainers to swim with.
In 2010, Dawn was working with Tilikum from the pool’s edge when some of her hair drifted into the water.
In a police report, Jan Topoleski informed investigators: “Dawn was lying on her stomach… Tilikum was interacting with her nose to nose. Dawn’s long hair floated on the water into Tilikum’s mouth.”
Topoleski recalled how Dawn struggled to free her hair from Tilikum’s mouth, prompting him to push the alarm button.
When he turned back after activating the alarm, Dawn had disappeared.
Park CCTV footage shows Dawn entering the water at 13:38.
Five dreadful minutes later, at 13:43, Tilikum was seen swimming with her lifeless body in his jaws.
It took 20 minutes to retrieve her body from the pool.
Visitors and staff below the water’s surface witnessed Dawn’s final moments as the orca dragged her around the tank.
Staff member Lynne Schaber had been waiting for a signal for Tilikum to descend so that visitors could take photos.
Instead, she witnessed Tilikum killing Dawn in the pool, noting that he never let her come up for air despite her desperate attempts to surface and breathe.
One witness claimed that as they saw Dawn trying to exit the water, they observed Tilikum ‘impact her squarely in the chest’.
The witness added that he had ‘looped around and came back towards Dawn Brancheau with his mouth open.’
Even after Dawn’s body was recovered, witnesses reported that Tilikum tried to retrieve it.
The exact motive for Tilikum’s attack remains unknown.
Some theories suggest that orcas’ reliance on sonar for communication is disrupted by the concrete tanks, which echo their voices back at them.
It is noteworthy that there have never been recorded fatal attacks on humans by wild orcas, only by those in captivity.