Jury deliberates in suit over gorilla attack at zoo
Nia S. Scott is now 6 years old, but still bears the scars from her frightening encounter in 2003 with an escaped gorilla at the Franklin Park Zoo, and she should be compensated for it, the girl's lawyer said yesterday.
"She's not all better," Donald Gibson told a jury in Suffolk Superior Court, where Scott and her mother, Terrasita Duarte-Scott, are suing the zoo and five top officials.
"She's not back to the little girl she was when she walked into that exhibition - and she is not going to be for a long time," Gibson said.
He also told the jury in closing arguments in the civil case that they could award any amount of money they choose to the girl and her mother to compensate them for their physical and emotional injuries.
Kevin Kenneally, the zoo's lawyer, told jurors that Nia was "remarkable" as was her mother. Reading from medical reports, he suggested the injuries to both were minor or due to other life issues. "Be fair to us, and please be fair to Nia and her mother," he said.
Nia Scott went to the zoo with a family friend, Courtney Roberson, on Sept. 28, 2003. She was attacked by Little Joe, a western lowland gorilla who had escaped from his enclosure at the Tropical Forest exhibit. Nia testified Monday that the gorilla dragged her and attacked her with his "claws." Roberson, who settled her own lawsuit, testified that the gorilla slapped at the child five to eight times.
Jurors deliberated for about three hours yesterday without reaching a verdict. In this civil case, 14 jurors are allowed to deliberate and 12 must agree before a verdict is reached, according to lawyers. Deliberations resume today.
Gibson told jurors the zoo and the officials were negligent because they did not do enough to make sure Little Joe, who had escaped from the same place a month before the attack, could not get out. He said no one knows to this day how the gorilla defeated a ring of electrified wire draped around the enclosure designed to keep him inside.
Lawyers for the zoo and the zoo employees urged jurors to consider whether any lingering problems Nia Scott might have are solely the result of the confrontation with Little Joe or due to other issues in her life, such as the 2002 death of her father.
