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After police arrived, one officer radioed back: "There's a man down. He doesn't look good," he says, referring to the disfigured Nash. "We've got to get this guy out of here. He's got no face."
Nash was in critical condition in Stamford Hospital on Wednesday.
Herold, a 70-year-old widow whose daughter was killed in a car accident several years ago, told "TODAY" that the incident was "a freak thing."
She said Travis "couldn't have been more my son than if I gave birth to him." She rejected criticism that chimpanzees are inappropriate pets.
"It's a horrible thing, but I'm not a horrible person and he's not a horrible chimp." she said.
Travis appeared in TV commercials for Old Navy and Coca-Cola when he was younger, and at home he was treated like a member of the family. Don Mecca, a family friend from Colchester, N.Y., said Herold fed the chimp steak, lobster, ice cream and Italian food.
Colleen McCann, a primatologist at the Bronx Zoo, said chimpanzees are unpredictable and dangerous even after living among humans for years.
"I don't know the effects of Lyme disease on chimpanzees, but I will say that it's deceiving to think that if any animal is, quote-unquote, well-behaved around humans that means there is no risk involved to humans for potential outbursts of behavior," she said. "They are unpredictable, and in instances like this you cannot control that behavior or prevent it from happening if it is in a private home."
Chimp got exemption
Connecticut law requires primates weighing more than 50 pounds to be registered with the state. But state Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Dennis Schain said Herold's chimp was exempted because it did not appear to present a public health risk and was owned before the registration requirement began.
Blumenthal, the attorney general, sent letters to legislative leaders and DEP Commissioner Gina McCarthy, asking them to support a proposed law that would ban all potentially dangerous exotic animals, such as chimpanzees, crocodiles and poisonous snakes, from being kept in a residential setting in Connecticut.
McCarthy is seeking a similar law banning large primates. Her agency is also asking the public, police officers and animal control officers who are aware of large primates being kept as pets to report the animals to the agency.
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