Steve Irwin’s Cameraman Details His Final Moments With Stingray Amid 20th Anniversary of His Death

Steve Irwin‘s cameraman, Justin Lyons, recently recalled the tragic moment a stingray fatally pierced the chest of the late conservationist while they were filming a documentary at the Great Barrier Reef.

Lyons participated in a 60 Minutes Australia documentary titled Steve Irwin: A Wild Life, which aired on Wednesday, September 2, to mark 20 years since the man dubbed “The Crocodile Hunter” died.

In the documentary, Lyons shared that filming with stingrays was nothing new for the two men, as they’d done it “a hundred times before.”

Before things took a turn for the worse on September 4, 2006, Lyons said he got multiple shots of the TV personality with a “massive” bull ray stingray. They then wanted to get the “final shot, which would be the opening shot, because “by now the stingray was calm,” he said. However, it did not go as planned.

“The stingray is in front of me, buried in the sand. He swims up, swims over the top of it. It doesn’t move. But as he’s directly over the top of it, of course, it thought he was a tiger shark and started stabbing madly towards him with its tail,” Lyons recounted. “The water just boiled. I couldn’t see anything that was going on. Bubbles and thrashing and then all of a sudden it stopped, and the stingray swam away. The water calmed. So I just panned with the stingray … I let it go out of shot as I panned back to Steve. He came jumping up out of the water, screaming, and the water around him was now full of blood.”

“He screamed out, ‘It’s punctured me lung.’ I threw the camera into one of the rubber duckies, drag Steve into the boat,” Lyons remembered. “His khaki shirt is open, and he’s just got blood pouring out of a gash like that in his chest right over his heart. But he’s conscious, and he says to me, looks me right in the eye, and he says, ‘I’m dying.'”

The father of two — who shares Bindi, 28, and Robert, 22, with wife Terri — then fell unconscious as they went back to his boat, Croc One, where the crew attempted CPR on him for 45 minutes while they raced to Low Island.

“I just remember us putting in a massive effort to get him up the beach, put him in a little hut, and then I heard a chopper landing, and that was paramedics arriving, and I had this absolute sense of relief. I was like, ‘Oh my god, they’ll be able to bring him back to life. They will save him,'” Lyons said. “But within about 10 seconds of them being there, they just said, ‘No, he’s gone.’ And then it really hit me. It was like absolute despair.”

Over the years since his death at age 44, Terri, 62, Bindi, and Robert have honored Steve through their work at Australia Zoo.