The Fall and a Heroic Response
On August 19, 1996, at Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, a 3-year-old boy slipped away from his mother, climbed through a barrier, and fell nearly 20 feet into the Western Lowland Gorilla Pit. Visitors gasped in horror as the unconscious child lay surrounded by six gorillas. But what happened next stunned the world. Binti Jua, an 8-year-old female gorilla, gently approached the boy. With her own 17-month-old baby, Koola, clinging to her back, she carefully picked up the boy by the waist and carried him to an enclosure door where rescuers were waiting.