SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS/AP) - In new court documents, police say one of the three victims mauled at the San Francisco Zoo by a tiger was intoxicated and admitted standing atop a railing of the big cat enclosure and yelling and waving at the animal.
The documents say Paul Dhaliwal, 19, told the father of the teen that was killed, Carlos Sousa Jr., that the three young men yelled and waved at the tiger--but they insisted they never threw anything into its pen to provoke the cat.
According to published reports, the affidavit, which requested a search warrant for the surviving victims' cells phones and car, also cites multiple reports of a group of young men taunting animals at the zoo.
KCBS Expanded Coverage: SF Tiger Attack
The affidavit says toxicology results for Dhaliwal showed that his blood alcohol level was 0.16 percent after the attack - twice the legal threshold for drunkenness--while his 24-year-old brother Kulbir Dhaliwal's blood alcohol level was 0.04 percent and Sousa's was 0.02 percent.
Police also allege that all three had marijuana in their systems.
Yesterday, KCBS first reported that after the attack, police found blood inside the enclosure, in an area between the railing and the moat. That area is not open to the public.
At a Wednesday court hearing, the Dhaliwals' attorney, Shepard Kopp, denied his clients had done anything wrong. "It's not going to mean anything to our clients because they didn't commit any crimes and they didn't do anything to cause that tiger to jump out off the wall," he said.
However, the zoo has maintained that something did in fact provoke Tatiana the tiger to get out. "The story that was originally put forward by criminal defense attorneys, by personal injury attorneys, and by the two brothers was not true and not correct," declared SF Zoo spokesman Sam Singer. "Now it's turning out that the story is far more complicated and starts to shed some light on their activities that day."
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KCBS' Holly Quan reports
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