WATCH: Archive footage shows baby gorilla Kabibe celebrating her first birthday.
TORONTO – Staff at the San Francisco Zoo are in mourning after a 15-month-old gorilla was crushed to death in a “tragic accident.”
Kabibe, the zoo’s youngest gorilla, was killed after she unexpectedly darted under a closing hydraulic door when the gorillas were being transferred into their night enclosures after the zoo closed.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, for the first six months of the baby gorilla’s life, zoo staff provided 24-hour postnatal care after Kabibe’s mother rejected her.
“Some animal deaths are more difficult to process than others, and this tragedy has struck us all in the deepest way imaginable,” Tanya Peterson, the zoo’s executive director, said in a statement.
The zoo said it is reviewing its policies and procedures following the “tragic death.”
This isn’t the first time the death of an animal has occurred at the zoo: On Christmas Day in 2007, police shot and killed a female Siberian tiger after it escaped from an enclosure and attacked three visitors, killing a man and mauling two others.
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