The Opiate, Summer Vol. 14
Tilikum Gets Loose Drew Buxton
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renda said the trainers deserved whatever happened to them like when people got gored in the running of the bulls in Spain. We were fixing tacos, and the documentary Blackfish was playing in the den. She liked to have it on all the time in the background. It was all just sad to me, for everybody. The trainers had been sold a lie and were victims too. We started arguing about it again but she got angry so fast. We spread out on the sectional in the den to eat, and it was at the part where Tilikum kills his first victim, this young girl who had a chance of going to the Olympics for swimming. Brenda accused me of being sexist and thinking women can’t handle disturbing things like men can. She thought I’d seen the new Gina Hinrich video but wouldn’t show it to her. She was obsessed with finding
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the footage. Gina had just graduated high school, and it’d only been her third week at SeaWorld. The forums were saying that SeaWorld was working hard to stop spectator cell phone videos getting out because it was way worse than the others. Someone said they knew from someone who’d been there that Tilly had flung her limbs into different sections of the stands. I really wanted to find the video too, and that’s what I kept trying to tell Brenda. We set our empty plates on the coffee table and sat there, not talking for a while. She seemed mad at me still, so I asked her if she’d heard about what had happened just down the road with Cassie Wilkins. The police dash-cam video, “Drug Dealer Drives Off Bridge,” was blowing up on YouTube. It showed her fleeing in the Audi A6 she bought with her own money
