Steve is no longer with us
A Pathetic Death of Steve
On 4 September 2006, Irwin was fatally pierced in the chest by a stingray spine while snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, at Batt Reef, which is located off the coast of Port Douglas in north Queensland. Irwin was in the area filming his own documentary, Ocean's Deadliest, but weather had stalled filming. Irwin decided to take the opportunity to film some shallow water shots for a segment in the television program his daughter Bindi Irwin was hosting, when, according to his friend and colleague, John Stainton, he swam too close to one of the stingrays. "He came on top of the stingray and the stingray's barb went up and into his chest and put a hole into his heart," said Stainton, who was on board Irwin's boat the Croc One.
The events were caught on camera, and a copy of the footage was handed to the Queensland Police. After reviewing the footage of the incident and speaking to the cameraman who recorded it, marine documentary filmmaker and former spearfisherman Ben Cropp speculated that the stingray "felt threatened because Steve was alongside and there was the cameraman ahead." In such a case, the stingray responds to danger by automatically flexing the serrated spine on its tail (which can measure up to 25 cm/10 in in length) in an upward motion.
Cropp said Irwin had accidentally boxed the animal in. "It stopped and twisted and threw up its tail with the spike, and it caught him in the chest. It's a defensive thing. It's like being stabbed with a dirty dagger." The stinging of Irwin by the bull ray was "a one-in-a-million thing," Cropp told Time magazine. "I have swum with many rays, and I have only had one do that to me...".
Initially, when Irwin's colleague, John Stainton, was interviewed by CNN's Larry King late on 4 September 2006 he denied the suggestion that Irwin had pulled the spine out of his chest, or that he had seen footage of the event, insisting that the anecdote was "absolute rubbish." The following day, when he first described the video to the media, he stated, "Steve came over the top of the ray and the tail came up, and spiked him here [in the chest], and he pulled it out and the next minute he's gone."
It is thought, in the absence of a coroner's report, that a combination of the toxins and the puncture wound from the spine caused Irwin to die of cardiac arrest, with most damage being inflicted by tears to arteries or other main blood vessels. A similar incident in Florida a month later in which a man survived a stingray barb through the heart suggested that Irwin's rem
oval of the barb might have caused or hastened his death. The coroner's report has not yet been released.
Crew members aboard his boat called the emergency services in the nearest city of Cairns and administered CPR as they rushed the boat to the nearby Low Islets to meet an emergency rescue helicopter. However, despite the best efforts of Irwin's crew, medical staff pronounced him dead when they arrived a short time later. According to Dr Ed O'Loughlin, who treated Irwin, "it became clear fairly soon that he had non-survivable injuries. He had a penetrating injury to the left front of his chest. He had lost his pulse and wasn't breathing."
Cairns, Queensland
Irwin's body was flown to a morgue in Cairns. His wife, Terri Irwin, was on a walking tour in Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park in Tasmania at the time, and returned via a private plane from Devonport to the Sunshine Coast with their two children.
Fatalities due to stingrays are infrequent and occurrences are not consistently collated. The attack on Irwin is believed to be the only fatality from a stingray ever captured on film.
Stainton told CNN's Larry King "[The tape] should be destroyed". In an ABC interview with Barbara Walters, Irwin's wife Terri said she has not seen the film of her husband's deadly encounter with the stingray and that it would not be shown on television. On 3 January 2007, the only video footage showing the events that led to Irwin's death was handed over to Terri, who said that the video would never become public, and noted her family has not seen the video either. In a 11 January 2007 interview with Access Hollywood, Terri said that "all footage has been destroyed." Despite these statements, numerous videos, including screamers, surfaced on sites such as YouTube claiming to be footage of Irwin's death. Several pictures have also surfaced on Google Images.
Production was completed on Ocean's Deadliest, which aired for the first time on the Discovery Channel on 21 January 2007. The documentary was completed with footage shot in the weeks following the accident. According to Stainton, "Anything to do with the day that he died, that film is not available." Perhaps to maintain the film's original purpose as a nature documentary and prevent it from becoming a documentary of Irwin's final days, his death is not mentioned in the film, aside from a still image of Irwin at the end alongside the text "In Memory of Steve Irwin".