The Texas man accused of taking two monkeys from the Dallas Zoo and tampering with other exhibits calmly visited a Dallas aquarium, where employees quickly identified him as the suspect in a string of odd zoo crimes.
An image of a man, now identified as 24-year-old Davion Irvin, had been circulated after the incidents at the zoo, and Paula Carlson said she and her colleagues at the Dallas World Aquarium were on heightened alert all week.
Those wide eyes paid off, authorities said, when aquarium employees spotted Irvin and called the Dallas Zoo, which notified police, leading to the man’s arrest.
“I immediately called my friend at the Dallas Zoo and said ‘I don’t think I’m crazy, but I believe I might have seen your person of interest’ and they acted on it immediately and the rest is history,” Carlson, the aquarium’s director of husbandry, said Friday night.
More coverage of the suspicious incidents at the Dallas Zoo
An uneventful Thursday afternoon turned upside down when a colleague of Carlson’s rushed up to her and said the most wanted man in North Texas animal circles might be in the rain forest exhibit of their aquarium.
“One of our staff members had seen him and said to me ‘I think this may be the person of interest they’re looking for but I’m not sure. Can you take a look?'” Carlson said.
“So I thought OK let me look. And sure enough, he really met that description.”
For the next 20 minutes, Carlson said she periodically approached the young man and chatted about the underwater life they were observing.
Carlson, 58, didn’t want to smother the man with attention so she made sure to engage other guests — all while keeping an eye on the him and letting security know what she was doing.
The man asked her routine questions about manatees, octopus and sawfish and didn’t seem different to Carlson than any other aquarium guest.
“I felt like he was very curious about animals, to me it seemed like a genuine curiosity, not unlike the visitors we get here, ‘what is this,…
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