“And he just sort of calmly looked up at me and said ‘I’m dying,’” Lyons said. Hang on.”Ī father of two, Irwin’s son and daughter were just three and eight at the time. Lyons said he kept talking to Irwin, telling him: “Think of your kids, Steve. “He had an extraordinary threshold for pain, so I knew that when he was in pain, it must have been painful.” “He was in extraordinary pain,” said Lyons, adding that the stingray’s barb also contained venom. Within seconds, crewmembers on the inflatable reached the two men, and Irwin was pulled on board. Lyons said he believes the stingray had mistaken Irwin’s shadow for a tiger shark, one of its natural predators.īlood and fluid began rapidly flowing out of Irwin. “He thought it had punctured his lung, and he stood up out of the water and said ‘it’s punctured my lung.’ ” “It went through his chest like a hot knife through butter,” Lyons said. Those strikes were punctuated by a sharp barb at the end stingray’s tail, which plunged rapidly into Irwin’s chest.

“And all a sudden it (the stingray) propped on its front and started stabbing (Steve) with its tail. “I had the camera and thought this was going to be a great shot,” Lyons said. Lyons said he and Irwin slipped out of the boat, briefly making a plan about how they would collect footage of the eight-foot-wide bull ray - a type of stingray that gets its name from its distinct head shape.Īfter several minutes of shooting, Lyons said they stood up and decided “one last shot.” The plan was for Irwin to swim behind the stingray so Lyons could get a shot of the large creature swimming away. Irwin’s long-time cameraman Justin Lyons said the crew had been out on an inflatable boat in the Batt Reef in Queensland, Australia when they spotted a “massive” stingray swimming through the chest-high water. Now the only man who witnessed Irwin death’s has spoken publicly about the incident for the first time in an interview with the Australian morning program Studio 10. Irwin was fatally injured by a violent stingray attack in 2006 while shooting a documentary entitled “Ocean’s Deadliest” on the Great Barrier Reef. Those were his only words - his last - before he died. He looked up at his cameraman, a gaping stingray barb wound in his chest, and said “I’m dying.” Steve Irwin, the legendary and seemingly invincible “Crocodile Hunter,” knew it was likely the end.

Is there footage of steve irwins death