Steve Irwin’s cameraman, Justin Lyons, is speaking out for the first time since a giant stingray killed the legendary ‘Crocodile Hunter’.
Justin Lyons commented on the incident that left Steve Irwin dead in shallow water while filming in a Queensland reef eight years ago.
Lyons spoke with Australia’s Studio 10 and recounted the final moments of Steve Irwin’s life.
They had just wrapped filming and were getting one final shot when the stingray – which had been swimming away propped itself up and stabbed Irwin through the chest “hundreds of times.”
Lyons commented that he didn’t know Steve had been injured at first. Here’s his statement from the Sydney Morning Herald:
“I had the camera on, I thought this is going to be a great shot, and all of sudden it propped on its front and started stabbing wildly, hundreds of strikes in a few seconds,” Lyons said during an interview on Network Ten’s morning show Studio 10.
“I panned with the camera as the stingray swam away and I didn’t know it had caused any damage. It was only when I panned the camera back that I saw Steve standing in a huge pool of blood.”
“It’s a jagged barb and it went through his chest like hot butter.”
Lyons said Irwin knew he was in trouble and believed the stingray had punctured his lung. “He had a two-inch-wide injury over his heart with blood and fluid coming out of it and we had to get him back to the boat as fast as we can,” Lyons said.
“He obviously didn’t know it had punctured his heart … even if we had got him into an emergency ward at that moment we probably we wouldn’t have been able to save him.
“I was saying to him things like ‘think of your kids Steve, hang on, hang on, hang on’, and he calmly looked up at me and said ‘I’m dying’ and that was the last thing he said.”
Here’s footage of the entire interview Studio 10 segment:
Photo Credits: Richard Giles
