Chimpanzee attack woman makes small progress after seven hours of surgery

By Calvin Palmer

The victim of Monday’s attack by a chimpanzee showed small signs of progress yesterday after undergoing more than seven hours of surgery on her face and hands by four teams of surgeons at Stamford Hospital, Connecticut.

Paramedics say Charla Nash, 55, lost her nose, eyes and jaw in the savage attack by the 200-pound chimpanzee, Travis, owned by her friend Sandra Herold.

“While she remains in critical but stable condition, her vital signs are improving,” Dr Kevin Miller, an attending surgeon at Stamford Hospital, said at a news conference. “We are thankful that we are able to report that Charla Nash has made good but small progress.”

Scott Orstad, a spokesman for the hospital, said that Nash’s family was consulting with her doctors on what steps to take next. One option might be a face transplant, but he said that decision had not been made.

“I don’t know if they’ve gone to that level,” he said. “The doctors are still determining whether that may be necessary. That rumor is still kind of premature. The final decision has not been made yet.”

There were no announced plans to transfer Nash from Stamford Hospital.

Charla Nash’s injuries were so horrific — Sandra Herold told a 911 dispatcher that her pet was eating Charla — that the hospital was providing counseling to the staff members who treated her.

Orstad said some members of the team that initially treated Nash had already sought counseling.

“Members of the staff have said this is something they’ve never experienced in their career,” Orstad said.

Police are looking into the possibility of criminal charges against Herold because pet owners can be held criminally responsible if they know an animal poses a danger to others.

Connecticut law requires primates weighing more than 50 pounds to be registered with the state. But Dennis Schain, a spokesman for the State Department of Environmental Protection, said Herold’s chimp was exempted because he did not appear to present a public health risk and was owned before the registration requirement began.

Yesterday, a former Stamford resident, Leslie Mostel-Paul, 52, claimed that Travis bit her hand in November 1996 when she tried to pet him in the parking lot of a local doctor’s office.

Mostel-Paul says she contacted police, but her complaint was brushed aside.

“If the police had taken care of what they needed to, this woman wouldn’t be lying in intensive care right now,” Mostel-Paul said. “He shouldn’t have been in the house.”

Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said he had no record of the incident and could not confirm or deny its validity.

[Based on reports by The New York Times and New York Daily News.]