http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0430chimp0430.html

Texas man saves pal during raid by chimp

Claire Osborn Cox News Service Apr. 30, 2006 12:00 AM

AUSTIN - His friend's hand was a mangled mess; most of it was gone. The station wagon had stalled after the driver desperately tried to ram through a gate. Now, the chimpanzee that had attacked them on an isolated mountain road in West Africa was coming at them again.

What was supposed to be a day of sightseeing April 23 at Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary had turned into a moment seared into Gary Brown's memory.

"I knew I was going to die, but I didn't want to die running," said the Texas man, 51, who was working as a contractor in Sierra Leone.

Inside the Peugeot station wagon were Brown, Melvin Mammah, a friend Brown had met in Freetown, two American co-workers and Issa Kanu, their driver.

Brown was in Africa working for a telecommunications company at the American Embassy, officials with Spectrum Solutions and Caddell Construction reported.

Brown, who returned home Tuesday, didn't know at the time that more than a dozen chimps had escaped from the 100-acre sanctuary on the outskirts of the capital of Freetown. He also didn't know chimps would attack people. When the chimp appeared on the road in front of them, he fished for his camera, eager to get a snapshot.

Kanu seemed to know something was wrong and put the wagon in reverse. That's when the chimp charged, Brown said. The chimp tore off the side mirror and broke through the back windshield.

"It was like the glass wasn't even there," he said.

Brown said he's 5-feet-9 and weighs more than 200 pounds, and the chimp outweighed him.

"He had 2-inch fangs, and he was screaming like a banshee," Brown said.

Mammah fought the chimp, but not before the chimp bit off half of his hand, he said.

They wrapped up Mammah's hand and drove forward, trying to outrun the chimp. Then they came to a steel gate. Kanu rammed it, and the gate opened, but not enough to get the car through, he said.

The car stalled, its front end crumpled. Reverse didn't work, so they got out trying to push it backward so they could turn it around, Brown said.

"He was charging again, coming up the road," Brown said of the chimp. "When we turned around, we all dove in the car."

Kanu again tried the key. The wagon started, and he tried to drive through the opening in the gate, but the car became wedged into the opening.

The chimp "went across the top of the car, and that's when . . . it was just a flurry trying to get away from it. Melvin got pulled out of the car."

When he jumped out of the car, he heard Mammah screaming for help. Everyone else in the car had fled.

Brown, a telephone lineman used to facing down angry dogs, spotted a large tree limb.

"I grabbed it, and I just started to charge around the car to go help Melvin," he said. "I believe it was God who got me through it; he turned my fear into anger."

The chimp charged him, he said, and he drove the end of the limb into its throat, then chased it away.

Brown helped Mammah hobble down the road, where a military patrol found them and took them to a hospital. Later, a van pulled up with Kanu's mangled body.

Mammah, who lost three fingers, is recovering in a Freetown hospital. The two other Americans escaped without injury.

Doug Cress, executive director of Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, said that chimps in the sanctuary are former pets that have been abused by humans. He said the chimp that attacked Brown's group was panicked because it was in unfamiliar territory.

Chimpanzees are five times stronger than humans and when they get upset in the wild, they uproot trees and throw rocks and "just go insane with pent-up force," Cress said.

"From what they explained to me," Brown said, "I became the alpha male when I charged him. He wasn't expecting a fight."