Steve Irwin’s cameraman, Justin Lyons, who was filming with him the day he died, has spoken for the first time in eight years about the crocodile hunter’s death.
Justin, who was described by Steve as his right-hand man, says he remembers the day “very clearly”.
“He calmly looked at me and said ‘I’m dying’,” Justin told Studio 10 of Steve’s last words as his crew desperately tried to take him back to shore for emergency help.
Justin was the sole witness to the attack on Steve, which occurred when the pair went diving together to film a documentary called Ocean’s Deadliest.
The pair had spotted a large stingray and decided to film it as part of another project they were working on.
“This one was extraordinarily large, it was eight feet long, massive, a bull ray,” Justin said.
“It was very impressive. We were only in chest-deep water, we slipped over the side of the inflatable, we stood up and chatted about what we were going to do – we always made a bit of a plan when filming under water – and we just started filming.”
What happened next was completely unexpected.
“We stood up and said ‘one last shot, you swim up behind the animal and I’ll get a shot of him swimming away,’” Justin said.
“I thought ‘this is going to be a great shot’ … all of a sudden [the stingray] propped on its front and began stabbing wildly with its tail, hundreds of strikes in a few seconds.
“It probably thought that Steve’s shadow was a tiger shark, which feed on them quite regularly. I panned with the camera as the stingray swam away. I didn’t even know it had caused any damage. It wasn’t until I panned the camera back that I saw Steve was standing in a pool of blood.”
The crew did their best to get Steve emergency help, with Justin carrying out CPR on Steve for more than an hour, but the stingray barb had pierced Steve’s lung and heart.
Justin says he’s still shocked that a stingray claimed the life of the Australian icon.
“It was probably going to be something weird with Steve, I mean a crocodile or a shark, he was so good with animals nothing was going to get him,” he said.
“We thought he was going to live forever, but we always thought it was going to be a crazy, silly accident and as it turns out that’s exactly what it was.”
Watch the video of Justin’s interview in the video player above.
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