TIGER King Joe Exotic’s former campaign manager says that he’s suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after witnessing the death of Joe’s ex-husband.
Joshua Dial, who looked after Joe’s gubernatorial campaign in Oklahoma, witnessed Travis Maldonado accidentally shoot himself dead.
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“I definitely have PTSD,” Dial told People on Thursday. “There was no preparation for what I saw in that office. It was so shocking. I have nightmares about it.”
According to Dial, on that fateful day, Maldonado woke him up like he did most mornings: by pointing a gun at him.
“What Travis would do in the mornings is he would kick down the door, point a gun at you,” he told them.
“That very day he did that to me. He broke in my room, pointed that new gun that he said would not fire without a clip at me, and asked me to wake up. I’m lucky to even be alive.”
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Dial says he and Maldonado, who came to the zoo in 2013, were in his office at the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park when the shooting occurred.
“He said, ‘Hey, did you know a Ruger won’t fire without a clip?,’” he says. “I said, ‘Really?’ He put the gun to his temple at that point and pulled the trigger.”
After Maldonado’s October 6 death, Dial claims that Joe Exotic called a meeting and accused staffers of not doing enough to save his young husband – and then made them watch a video of a tiger attacking a zoo staffer, leading to the amputation of the staffer’s arm.
But Dial says there was no way for anyone to save Maldonado.
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“The second he pulled the trigger, I knew he was dead,” he says. “You don’t come back from something like that.”
After appearing on a podcast, a GofundMe page launched to help pay for counseling for Dial.
So far he has raised more than $4,000.
“I’ve just been grateful for the support of people that are trying to get me help for counseling,” he told them.
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“I don’t want to have to ask for help, but I know that everything I went through, especially working over a-year-and-a-half looking at that bullet hole thousands of times, I need help.
“It’s been a hard realization for me to come to. To watch someone take their own life is a violation against nature. It’s not something that the human brain is meant to deal with.”
The documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is streaming now on Netflix.
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