Charla Nash- Survival Of Gory Chimp attack

On February 16, 2009, Charla Nash paid a frequent visit to her longtime friend Sandra Herold's house. The visit was regrettably anything but usual.

Sandra and her husband, Jerome Herold, had adopted a young chimpanzee named Travis over a decade earlier. Although he was a cherished member of the community and had lived in the home with humans since he was three days old, he had been experiencing periods of irrational behavior for a number of years.

Tragically, the chimp — who had dressed himself, done chores around the house, and kept Sandra company after her husband’s passing — viciously attacked Charla Nash that morning, leaving her permanently disfigured

Sandra Herold and Charla Nash Were Long Time Friends

Sandra Herold had experienced two major losses before the incident that maimed her friend. The Herolds' sole child, Suzan, died in September 2000 after car collided with a tree on a lonely Virginia roadway .

Suzan's infant daughter was unharmed, but Sandra Herold's relationship with her grandchildren suffered as she sank into depression after he daughter's passing.

The second tragedy occurred in April 2005 when Herold's husband passed away from stomach cancer following a few weeks of hospitalization. Their pet chimpanzee Travis also experienced a terrible depression as a result of the untimely loss.

“We are both lost without him and miss him dearly. Travis still waits for him especially at supper time, because at that time they both had a glass of wine with their supper,” Herold wrote in a letter to a chimpanzee sanctuary owner in Florida, nearly a year after Jerry’s death.

“I live alone with Travis, we eat and sleep together but I am worried that if something happens to me as suddenly as my husband what would happen to Travis, therefore I have to try to do something before that happens.”

Nash and her daughter, who was 12 at the time, struggled to find long-term housing and at one point spent more than a year in a homeless shelter. Nash was making ends meet by doing odd jobs, yard work, and cleaning stalls for horses.

But shortly after Jerry's passing, Nash and Herold reconnected, and on top of that, Herold gave Nash and her daughter a rent-free loft apartment that had belonged to her late daughter. She also gave Nash a job handling towing dispatch and bookkeeping.

The ferocious assault on Charla Nash by Travis the Chimp

Sandra Herold and Charla Nash took a rare vacation in 2009, traveling to the Mohegan Sun Casino in Montville, Connecticut, over a weekend in February. Herold took her friend to the salon before they left — just in case, she joked, two eligible bachelors happened to appear.

But on February 16, when they got home, Herold found a very upset Travis. While she was cleaning his room, he took her keys from the kitchen counter, unlocked the door, and went out into the yard.

He exhibited no interest in the things he usually liked for the rest of the day. Herold added a Xanax(drug used to treat anxiety and panic disorders) to his afternoon tea out of concern.

The accounts varied at this point; Nash insisted that Herold had called and requested for her assistance in luring Travis back into the house. However, Herold said that Nash had made a help offer.

In any case, Charla Nash showed up at the Herold residence at 3:40 p.m. The front yard was where Travis was. Nash showed him his favorite toy, a Tickle-Me-Elmo doll, in an effort to entice him back into the house.

Then, something in Travis broke. Nash was thrown into the side of her car and then to the ground by Travis. He did this while standing on his two legs. She was bleeding on the ground as he continued to torture her.

Herold began hysterically beating Travis over the head with a shovel, but the chimp wouldn’t stop. Not knowing what else to do, she ran into her house, grabbed a butcher knife, and stabbed him in the back. Still, he didn’t stop. She stabbed him twice more.

Travis stood up, looked his owner directly in the face, and then continued his assault on Nash.

Frantically, Herold dialed 911. “He’s killing my friend!” she screamed. “He ripped her apart! Hurry up! Hurry up! Please!”

Nearly incomprehensible with panic, she told the dispatch officer, “He — he ripped her face off … He’s eating her!”

Charla Nash’s Journey Of Recovery

Travis was bloodied and stalking the area when cops arrived. Travis was shot multiple times by the cop, and while he bled, he ran into the house. He left a bloody trail behind him as he made his way through the kitchen and bedroom to his room, where he passed away while holding his bedpost.

The yard was covered in pieces of Nash's corpse, including flesh, fingers, and almost all of her blood. Her eyelids, nose, mouth, lips, and a sizable section of her scalp had all been ripped off by Travis.

As the officer approached what was sure to be her lifeless body, she reached out for his leg. Somehow, Charla Nash was still alive.

She was transported from Stamford to the Cleveland Clinic three days after the incident in severe condition. There, she would receive 15 months of treatment.

In what is now regarded as one of television's most amazing moments, Charla Nash exposed her face live on Oprah Winfrey's show on the day of her 56th birthday, nine months after the attack.

She has had numerous reconstructive procedures since then, including a face transplant.

Perhaps the saving grace in Nash’s story — if there is to be one — is that she doesn’t remember the attack, over a decade later.

Nash, now in her late 60s, spends her time listening to audiobooks and music, but she is still blind from the attack. She may not have lost her life, but the woman she was is all but gone — she even wears another person’s face entirely.