Featured Image Credit: YouTube / Studio 10/ YouTube / Animal Planet
Topics: Steve Irwin, Australia, Celebrity
Britt Jones
Topics: Steve Irwin, Australia, Celebrity
Steve Irwin’s cameraman opened up about the conservationist's tragic final words.
Justin Lyon was a long-term crew member who worked with Irwin for over a decade.
He was also with him while filming Ocean’s Deadliest in the Great Barrier Reef in 2006, which was when Irwin was attacked by a stingray, leading to the death of a man the world loved to watch wrangle crocodiles.
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According to Lyons, it all began when he and Irwin were looking for tiger sharks, even though filming wasn’t meant to happen that day.
In 2022, Lyons told Daily Mail Australia: "Steve wasn't one to sit around and wait, so I said let's jump in the boat and see what we can find.
"We never wasted a minute. We were always shooting and because we had some spin-off shows, we used every frame of every shot."
While in the water, the pair came across a large stingray, but they tend to be docile so they wanted to get a closer look.
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The camera man explained: "We knew the behaviour. We weren't scared of them.
"We thought this was going to be a joy. We were swimming around [the stingray], he'd glide off and settle on the bottom."
Speaking to Australian morning programme Studio 10 in 2014, Lyons said: “I had the camera and thought this was going to be a great shot. But all a sudden the stingray propped on its front and started stabbing Steve with its tail.
“There were hundreds of strikes within just a few seconds.”
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He recalled to the studio: “He just sort of calmly looked up at me and said, ‘I’m dying’. And that was the last thing he said.”
Lyons went on to say that he didn't expect to lose his friend, and that there was 'always hope'.
He said he did CPR on Irwin for 'over an hour' until the zookeeper was pronounced dead within 10 seconds of medical responders looking at him.
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Irwin, who was just 44 at the time of his death, was survived by his adoring wife Terri and two children Bindi and Robert, who were eight and two at the time.
Now young adults, Bindi and Robert have done their animal-loving dad proud, following in his footsteps at the family-run Australia Zoo.
Due to the fact that Irwin instructed Lyons to film, even when if he was dying, there is a tape recording of his final moments.
However, nobody knows where it is, though Terri believes that it’s sitting in a dusty police vault which was left after the 2007 investigation concluded.