Cameron Knight

cknight@enquirer.com

Brittany Nicely is not the mother of the boy who fell into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo prompting officials to shoot and kill a 17-year-old silverback.

That hasn’t stopped strangers from flooding her social media accounts with insults.

Nicely, of Dayton, spoke with the Enquirer and several television stations on Saturday after the incident.

Despite all of the reports stating she was a witness to the event, some people took to Facebook thinking she was the 3-year-old’s mother.

“Good parenting, b****,” one woman wrote to Nicely. Messages like these and others prompted the mother of two to temporarily disable her Facebook page.

“Just a bunch of name calling and people saying I’m an irresponsible parent,” she said Tuesday. “I think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t read anything. They see something, they go by what other people are saying and then they jump to conclusions.”

Zoo incident highlights phenomenon of parent shaming

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On Saturday, Nicely was visiting the zoo with her two children, some friends and four other kids.

"Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the little boy in the bushes past the little fence area. I tried to grab for him. I started yelling at him to come back," Nicely said.

"Everybody started screaming and going crazy," she said. "It happened so fast."

The area was then evacuated by zoo staff. Nicely stood with her group outside the exhibit.

"About four or five minutes later we heard the gunshot," she said. "We were pretty distraught. All the kids were crying."

Nicely said she spent the trip home explaining to the children why they are told to stay close and not run at the zoo.

“People make mistakes,” she said. “You turn your head for a second, and you could lose it all in a second.”

Nicely maintains that from what she saw, the entire situation was a tragic accident. She said she supports the zoo’s decision to use deadly force to protect the boy and doesn't blame the mother for what happened.

“The difference between her and any other parent, who is a good parent when their children get in accidents, is her’s was at the zoo,” she said. “It wasn’t at the pool, it wasn’t at a park, it wasn’t at a mall where people are getting snatched up.”

Nicely said she’s tried to ignore the rage many people have directed at the mother of the boy on social media, but can’t get away from it.

“I don’t think the taste of what I got is anywhere near what she’s getting,” she said. “They are saying terrible things.”

After taking down her Facebook account, Nicely said some of her friends asked why she was hiding from what was happening.

“I told them I’m not hiding, but people are cruel. Where’s the humanity?” she said. “There’s no love - there’s not a lot of it anyway I feel - today in this world. It’s pretty sad.”