Charla Nash had been to that house in Stamford many times. She and Sandra Herold were close friends, and she knew Travis, the 14 year old chimpanzee Herold kept as part of the family.
On February 16, 2009, she pulled up expecting nothing unusual.
Travis charged her almost immediately, and what followed became one of the worst animal attacks Connecticut has ever recorded.
He knocked her to the ground and the assault began instantly. Within seconds it had passed beyond anything the people there could stop.
He tore away both her hands and destroyed much of her face while she lay pinned beneath him.
Herold grabbed a large knife and struck him repeatedly, trying to force him off her friend. Travis absorbed serious wounds and kept going anyway.
She eventually got through to emergency services. The 911 operator could hear the chaos over the line, with Travis screaming in the background, and police were dispatched without anyone knowing what was waiting for them.
When officers arrived, the chimpanzee moved toward one of their vehicles, pulled the door open, and bared his blood covered teeth at the man inside.
The officer fired, and Travis was killed at the scene.
From beginning to end, the attack ran roughly 12 minutes.
Nash had lost both hands and suffered catastrophic damage to her face and eyes. She was left blind, facing years of surgery and rehabilitation ahead of her.
Doctors carried out numerous reconstructive procedures, and she later received a face transplant, one of the most complex operations in modern medicine.
She survived it.
Why Travis attacked someone he had known for years became the central question afterward, and it was never fully resolved.
Herold had reportedly given him Xanax that day, and he was on medication connected to Lyme disease. Nash had also recently changed her hairstyle, which some accounts suggested may have caused him to react to her as a stranger.
None of it was ever established with certainty.
What is certain is that Travis was never a household pet, regardless of how the household treated him. Chimpanzees feel familiar to us because of how closely related they are, and that familiarity hides enormous strength, powerful jaws, and physical capabilities that make an attack almost impossible to survive intact.
The case reopened a long running argument about keeping powerful wild animals in private homes.
Travis had lived with Herold for years. He was, by every account, treated as family, right up until the afternoon when the arrangement collapsed in twelve minutes.
Nash lost her hands, her sight, and most of her face, and she came out of it alive, which by any reasonable measure should not have happened.
Her story keeps getting told because of what it demonstrates. An animal can spend its entire life around people and still turn out to be exactly what it always was.
