While authorities have said that Brancheau fell into the holding tank at Shamu Stadium, and was then fatally injured by one of the orcas, witnesses disagree. Park guest Victoria Biniak told Local 6 that Brancheau had just finished explaining the show to the audience.
Then, Biniak said, the whale rose up from the water and grabbed the woman, in a horrific scene from some science fiction movie. Biniak told Local 6:
"He was thrashing her around pretty good. It was violent. (The whale) took off really fast in the tank, and then he came back, shot up in the air, grabbed the trainer by the waist and started thrashing around, and one of her shoes flew off."In 2006, a trainer at SeaWorld was hospitalized after a killer whale grabbed him and twice held him underwater during a killer whale show at Shamu Stadium.
However, the orca in this case, Tillikum, nicknamed "Tilly," has had issues in the past. The killer whale was blamed for the drowning of one of his trainers in 1991 when he was performing at Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia. After being sold to SeaWorld as a stud in 1992, "Tilly" was involved in a second incident when authorities found the body of a 27-year-old naked homeless man lying across his back in July 1999.
It was later theorized that the man had either hidden until SeaWorld closed, or somehow snuck into SeaWorld after hours. They believed that Tilly had done a little "horseplay" with the man. Sheriff's spokesman Jim Solomons said at the time: "He may have been a victim of what a whale would call horseplay, just playing around."
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