The Texas man accused of taking two monkeys from the Dallas Zoo and tampering with other exhibits quietly paid a visit to a Dallas aquarium, where employees quickly identified him as the suspect in a series of bizarre incidents at the zoo.
The image of a man, now identified as 24-year-old Davion Irvin, circulated after the incidents at the zoo, and Paula Carlson said she and her colleagues at the Dallas World Aquarium were on high alert all week.
Those wide eyes paid off, authorities said, when aquarium employees saw Irvin and called the Dallas Zoo, which notified police, leading to the man’s arrest.
«I immediately called my friend at the Dallas Zoo and said ‘I don’t think you’re crazy, but I think you might have seen your person of interest’ and they acted immediately and the rest is history,» Carlson, the director of breeding from the aquarium, he said Friday night.
More coverage of suspicious incidents at the Dallas Zoo
An uneventful Thursday afternoon was turned upside down when a colleague of Carlson’s ran up to her and told her that the most wanted man in North Texas animal circles might be in her aquarium’s rainforest exhibit.
«One of our staff members had seen it and said, ‘I think this may be the person of interest you’re looking for, but I’m not sure. Can you take a look at him?'» Carlson said.
«So I thought it was okay, let me see. And sure enough, it really did fit that description.»
Over the next 20 minutes, Carlson said he periodically approached the man and chatted about the underwater life they were observing.
Carlson, 58, didn’t want to smother him with attention, so he made sure to get other guests involved, all while keeping an eye on him and letting security know what he was doing.
The man asked routine questions about manatees, octopus, and sawfish and seemed no different to Carlson from any other aquarium guest.
«I felt like he was very curious about the animals, to me it seemed like a genuine curiosity, not unlike the visitors we get here, ‘what’s this, what’s that?'» Carlson said.
Carlson, a former aquarium employee, did not recognize the man as a frequent visitor.
«He only looked familiar to me from the fact that I had seen his photo,» he said. «I had, via social media, pretty quick access to that photo. So when I wasn’t with him, I looked at that photo again and said ‘Oh yeah,’ and reinforced to myself that it looked a lot like that one. guy. »
As the man left the aquarium, Carlson jumped on the phone and let a friend at the Dallas Zoo know. The zoo then called the police and they followed the suspect’s trail.
Carlson said she didn’t want to create a stir if the man wasn’t the person in the photo released by police, so she called her friend, with whom she often talks about other zoo-related things.
«And I just said, ‘Hey, I think I may have seen the person y’all are looking for.'» And they took the ball and ran with it. And as we now know, she this was the person of interest,” she said.
Irvin has been accused of removing two emperor tamarins from their habitat and is also linked to tampering with the zoo’s clouded leopard and langur monkey exhibits, police said Friday. The leopard escaped and was missing for several hours before being found on the zoo grounds.
He was being held in the Dallas County Jail on two counts of burglary of a building, five counts of cruelty to non-livestock animals and one count of cruelty to livestock animals, jail records show.
Police said the public’s help was crucial in making the arrest.
«We tell people all the time that a little bit of information they have can help us crack the case,» Dallas police spokeswoman Kristin Lowman said Friday.
«The lead that came in for the house in Lancaster that led us to the missing monkeys; the lead that came in that it was near the Dallas World Aquarium that allowed us to go looking for this individual. We want you to call us and make that advice.» said.