The mother of the 3-year-old boy who fell into a gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo will not face charges, an Ohio prosecutor said Monday.
“By all accounts, this mother did not act in any way where she presented this child to some harm,” Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters said.
“She had three other kids with her and turned her back. … And if anyone doesn’t believe a 3-year-old can scamper off very quickly, they’ve never had kids.”
Witness: Child joked about going in enclosure
Witness: Child joked about going in enclosure 02:26
After the boy slipped into the enclosure May 28, he had a 10-minute encounter with Harambe, a 450-pound gorilla. A witness told CNN the boy’s mother was temporarily distracted by other children when the boy fell into the exhibit.
Harambe pulled the boy across a moat and was fatally shot by zoo personnel.
Deters said the zoo lost “a beautiful animal” that was beloved in the community, “but it’s still an animal. It does not equate human life.”
Zoo: We had to shoot Harambe
Video shows Harambe standing next to the child and dragging him through the water. The zoo has staunchly defended its decision to shoot Harambe as necessary to protect the child.
Related: Gorilla killed, boy saved
How it happened
Watch the video
The fingerpointing: who’s to blame?
What the witnesses say
Zoo stands by its decision
The investigation: Parents’ actions under review
Opinion: Try empathy, not blame
Staying safe at zoos
Why we mourn animal deaths so intensely
The boy was not seriously injured, but much of the scrutiny in the aftermath of the incident has fallen on his family.
One witness said she overheard the boy telling his mother he was going to get into the moat.
“The little boy himself had already been talking about wanting to go in, go in, get in the water and his mother is like, ‘No you’re not, no you’re not,’ ” said Kimberley Ann Perkins O’Connor.
Jack Hanna agrees with zoo's shooting of gorilla
Jack Hanna agrees with zoo’s shooting of gorilla 00:49
The mother admonished her son to behave before becoming distracted by other children with her, O’Connor said.
“Her attention was drawn away for seconds, maybe a minute, and then he was up and in before you knew it, she said.
For days, the Internet was barraged with think pieces on the incident — some condemning the boy’s parents.
They became the center of criticism as calls for criminal charges mounted. An online petition seeking “Justice for Harambe” received more than 500,000 signatures.
Opinion: Should parents leash their toddlers?
The family thanked its supporters but has declined donations, saying it was something “we do not want and will not accept, according to a statement released by family representative Gail Myers.
Instead, they asked that gifts be directed to the Cincinnati Zoo “in Harambe’s name.”
Four central figures in the FBI’s criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices are all using the same lawyer, a move described as a “red flag” by a former U.S. attorney who now runs a government watchdog group .
Lawyer Beth Wilkinson is representing: Clinton former chief of staff Cheryl Mills; policy adviser Jake Sullivan; media gatekeeper Philippe Reines; and former aide Heather Samuelson, who helped decide which Clinton emails were destroyed before turning over the remaining 30,000 records to the State Department.
“I think it would be a real red flag,” Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, or FACT, told Fox News, in reference to the legal defense. He suggested having a single lawyer would help the four Clinton aides align their stories for FBI interviews.
“The benefit is to have one lawyer’s brain have all the knowledge of the various pieces and parts, and so each of those potential targets or subjects of the investigation get to share information across that same attorney www.realracing3hackonline.com/ — and quite frankly get their story to sync up and understand what other people know of the situation,” he said.
Wilkinson is a well-respected Washington, D.C., attorney who successfully argued in favor of the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing case. Wilkinson has deep ties in Washington and is married to former NBC “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, who is now a regular political commentator on CNN.
Asked for comment, there was no immediate response from Wilkinson’s office. It has been their practice not to respond to press inquiries on this case www.farmheroessagahackcheat.com.
2016 Election Headquarters
The latest headlines on the 2016 elections from the biggest name in politics.
See Latest Coverage →
Whitaker was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa by President George W. Bush in June 2004 and held the position until November 2009, when President Obama’s appointed replacement was confirmed. He said the legal set-up presents challenges for FBI investigators in the Clinton probe.
“All you’re trying to do is seek the truth, and when someone is sharing a lawyer, you worry that the interview that you just did an hour ago with that attorney has been shared with the next witness and they can fix or reconcile their story to be the same,” Whitaker explained.
While apparently unusual, the legal representation has not been openly challenged by Justice Department officials.
A different perspective, presented by a leading defense attorney who asked not to speak on the record, is that the four Clinton aides plan to present a united front and do not fear criminal liability.
Politico first reported in April on the legal representation; since then, Mills and Wilkinson blocked questions about Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano – another key figure in the probe – during a civil suit deposition in Washington. Pagliano, who struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department last year, is now seeking to assert his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions in the same Judicial Watch proceedings mortal kombat x hack cheats.
Clinton told ABC News on Sunday that her email practices were in line with those of her predecessors. In a Friday radio interview with KNX 1070, Clinton said there is “absolutely no possibility” she’d be indicted.
Whitaker’s group FACT also is seeking the emails of Dennis Cheng, Clinton’s former deputy chief of protocol at the State Department, whose records may reveal a great deal about the possible intersection between Clinton Foundation work and Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Cheng was the point person for senior foreign government officials. Only a handful of Cheng emails were among the more than 30,000 pages made public by the State Department.
According to his State Department biography mobilestrikehackcheats.com, Cheng also served as Clinton’s national finance director when she was a senator, her New York finance director for her 2008 presidential campaign, and as a consultant to the William J. Clinton Foundation.
The FBI probe into Clinton’s email use is not the first time her record-keeping has faced federal scrutiny. Long before she became a secretary of state, Clinton’s billing records and documents tied to her work as a partner in the Rose Law Firm on behalf of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and Capital Management Services came under question. Those missing records from her work as a lawyer were at the crux of investigations by three separate federal agencies which cost taxpayers $65 million. A special committee’s report on the matter (page 155) said it received computer printouts of the billings in January 1996, “discovered under mysterious circumstances in the Book Room of the White House Residence.”
Clinton is still represented by the same lawyer who defended her throughout the in the 1980’s and 1990’s, David Kendall .
