“Sadly, she lost her life in a tragic accident while on her dream adventure,” Gail Mattson’s daughter posted on Facebook.
The family of a 79-year-old retiree from Minnesota says she decided to go on her last big adventure before turning 80. Now, they are planning her funeral after she was killed by a rampaging elephant on a safari in Zambia.
Gail Mattson was in a truck with other American tourists when an elephant charged at them. The vehicle they were in then came to a stop. Video from the incident shows the elephant flipping the vehicle over with its trunk, killing Mattson.
The 79-year-old vacationed in Zambia with her family and friends.
“Sadly, she lost her life in a tragic accident while on her dream adventure,” Mattson’s daughter posted on Facebook.
Mattson’s close friends Brenda Biggs and John Longabauth spoke with Inside Edition.
“She was going to be 80 in the summer and she felt that she was going to have to slow down a little bit,” Longabauth says.
“This was at the top of her bucket list, Africa,” Biggs says.
Longabauth says Mattson was looking forward to seeing animals up close in their environment.
“The sad part is here, an animal, she saw it alright. It came up real close, unfortunately too close,” he says.
The elephant attack happened in Kafue National Park.
Elephants can run up to 20 miles an hour and their trunks can lift more than 13,000 pounds.
In another incident two weeks ago, a bull elephant lifted a safari truck in South Africa with his trunk.
“They become incredibly territorial. They have a need to breed and basically push out and compete away anything that gets in their space, including people,” Jeff Corwin, wildlife biologist and host of Wildlife Nation, tells Inside Edition.
Corwin says judging from the videos taken of the elephant attacks in Zambia and South Africa, the tour guides tried to yell, a standard method of scaring off an angry elephant.
“If the ears are out, the elephant itself is trying to look larger than life,” Corwin says. “When those ears peel and fold back against the head, that elephant is likely gonna charge.”
The owner of the safari company in Zambia says vegetation in the area was thick and so the guide was unable to move the vehicle out of harm’s way.
