The worker who was killed by an escaped lion at a North Carolina zoo has been identified as a 22-year-old intern whose family says she died “following her passion.”
Alexandra Black, an intern at the Conservators Center in Burlington, was mauled Sunday by a beast that broke out of a locked enclosure during a routine cleaning.
“She was a beautiful young woman who had just started her career,” her family said in a statement to local outlets.
“There was a terrible accident and we are mourning. But she died following her passion.”
The recent graduate of Indiana State University had started working at the zoological center 10 days before the attack.
It was her fourth unpaid internship, which she’d taken “because she really wanted to make a career of working with animals,” the family said.
On her social media pages, Black wrote that she wanted to eventually become a zookeeper. A recent picture of the young woman showed a wolf “kissing” her nose.
Officials at the animal center, home to 14 lions, said they were “devastated by the loss of a human life” and would shutter until further notice.
“This is the worst day of my life. We’ve lost a person. We’ve lost an animal. We have lost the faith in ourselves a little today,” Mindy Stinner, executive director of the Conservators Center, said to ABC 11 on Sunday.
The center explained in a statement that a team, led by a trained animal keeper, had been cleaning the lion’s enclosure when the big cat, named Matthai, somehow left the space “and quickly killed one person.”
The male lion, who had previously been described on the zoological center’s website as “a little nervous by nature,” was shot and killed, according to CBS News. His page on the website has since been taken down.