Ten Minutes in Gorilla World: The Child, Harambe, and the Shot at the Cincinnati Zoo
A three-year-old boy slipped through the public barrier at Gorilla World in the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, pushed through brush, and fell about ten to fifteen feet into a shallow moat. Visitors screamed. A woman on the video can be heard shouting that she loves him.
Harambe, a seventeen-year-old western lowland silverback who weighed more than 400 pounds, came down into the water. He took the child by the leg and dragged him through the channel and onto concrete. Cincinnati Fire Department crews arriving on scene described violent dragging and throwing; the boy’s head struck the moat. He stayed conscious. Two females in the exhibit did not approach. Calls to lure Harambe back into holding failed.
Zoo director Thane Maynard said a tranquilizer dart would have taken several minutes to work and might have startled an already agitated animal still holding a toddler. The Dangerous Animal Response Team fired one rifle shot while the child was between the gorilla’s legs. Harambe died at once. Firefighters and zoo staff entered, pulled the boy out, and sent him to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He was treated for a concussion and scrapes and released the same night.

His family said he recovered without major motor injury.
The argument that followed was not about whether a 400-pound silverback can kill a small child. It was about whose failure put them in the same pit, and whether a dart should have been tried first. USDA inspectors later wrote that the barrier that day did not meet primate-housing standards: slack in the cable could be worked into a gap a child could use. The zoo called the shot a life-threatening-necessity decision and said it would make it again. Animal-rights groups held vigils. Police looked at the family’s supervision; the boy’s mother was not prosecuted.Harambe was an endangered animal in a breeding program, born in Texas and moved to Cincinnati in 2014. The child went home. The exhibit’s fence was rebuilt. The internet turned a dead gorilla into a meme. The physical facts are shorter: a toddler in a moat, ten minutes of dragging, one shot, two lives that could not both leave the enclosure unharmed.
Sources

The New York Times and The Guardian contemporaneous reports, May 2016.
Cincinnati Fire Department / EMS1 incident review; zoo director Thane Maynard statements.
USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service findings on the Gorilla World barrier (June 2016 inspection, reported November 2016).
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital discharge reporting via family and local police statements.