Netflix ‘Tiger King’ spoilers finds that in the second episode of Netflix’s hit ‘Tiger King’, about 10 minutes in, we get to hear Mario Tabraue detailing the murder of a Federal ATF Agent that he was involved in, we get to hear a lot about what Mario says that he didn’t do, and as the average viewer you’re sitting there shocked and appalled listening to this man casually describe taking another human life as you would biting into a hotdog or doing your laundry, so you can imagine the shock, horror, and visceral reaction that his family must have had when hearing about the details of his murder first hand on a television screen.
You might think that Netflix, or someone, must have given them a heads up, a note of permission to ask to use this footage and the detail of their husband, brother, and Father’s death in this documentary, but you would be giving them far too much credit. According to Jael Nash, son of Larry Nash, the murdered ATF Agent, there was no contact from Netflix. Recently, Jael Nash sat down with DSD – for a telephone interview and went into detail about how he found out that the Netflix documentary was capitalizing on his Father’s death.
Netflix ‘Tiger King’ Spoilers: Did Netflix commit a fatal error when shooting Tiger King?
No, it’s not a very long clip and Tubraue is not a major player in the documentary at all, but even watching the 1:54 second long clip where Tubraue goes into detail about what happened to this Federal Agent is terrifying even for an outsider. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for his son, having to sit there and take all of this in, detail by brutal detail recounting the murder, dismemberment, and cremation of his Father, with absolutely no heads up, no contact, no waiver signing, no anything. It was just mentioned, casually, with no thought to whether or not this Federal Agent, one of the good guys, had a family at all. Rather, it was the survivor, the bad guy, being allowed to tell his version of history. There is a saying that history is written by the victors, but I would argue that there were no victors here. None whatsoever.
Jael was robbed at a very early age of any kind of a relationship with his Father, the only real memory he has of his father is on his tenth birthday when his Mother came into his room bearing an envelope and telling him, “This was addressed to me, but it’s for you. I have bad news.” in the envelope was a headline from the Miami Times Herald stating “Missing Informant Feared Dead.” when asked how that made him feel back then, he gave the answer that probably any child would have given. “I still had hope. Because I focused on the word missing.”
It wasn’t until 2006, when a friend of his did some digging around the world wide web, did Jael actually find out the details of what happened to his Father. He had to find this out through third-hand information, through a well-meaning friend. No one from any sort of official office ever contacted the family with any sort of details, in fact, when the family has asked all of the official offices in charge of such affairs about the matter all they have received is pushback. They have been stopped in their tracks at every turn, and have even been told by officials to ‘find peace’ with their loved ones passing. Seriously, how does one find peace with no answers?
Since Jael was too young to remember his Father, his Aunt, Angela Parks was very helpful in putting together a fuller portrait of a well-loved family man who was a father, brother, and husband. Growing up, Angela said that Larry was her idol. There was a 13 year age difference between them, so by the time she was old enough to really hang out with him, he was already pretty much an adult, but that didn’t mean that their relationship was any less close. He was the best brother that a young girl could have asked for, taking her to the skating rink, fun places! It sounded like he adored her too. These days you often hear tales of sibling rivalry or siblings that literally can’t stand to be in the same room as one another. But Angela and Larry’s relationship was different, a callback to the time when your siblings were your family, and you stuck together.
During his life, Angela said that Larry was a bit of a daredevil. He was an adrenaline junkie. He also had a tastes for fast cars and the finer things in life, and he was a bit of a smooth talker. Images of Magnum P.I.’s lifestyle came to mind when I heard Angela describing him. You could see where he would fit into the profile of a good agent. He was also a paratrooper in the United States Army, so that definitely helped. When Angela last saw him, he was hard at work as an architectural engineer at Miami’s first zoo without cages. She had gone down to Miami to see her brother for a bit in 1979, the year before he disappeared. However by the time he went missing on July 15th 1980, she was already back home. She and her Mother did not get the news that he was actually missing until about a month later in August or September of 1980.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB6wYVCEY3w&t=133s
Any details that the family got after that were hard won, so that is when Larry and Angela’s Mother hired a private detective to look into the affairs down in South Florida, but was called in late January 1981 by a person claiming to be an insurance investigator who told her to pull out her private eye, and then proceeded to give her the names of several family members and Larry’s children, they gave her private, family information as well as phone numbers and addresses and said that they knew where these people lived. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sound like any insurance investigator I’ve ever talked to.
The sad fact of the matter is, their Mother worked tirelessly to find out exactly what happened to her son and the details of his service, but to no avail. Larry Nash’s Mother died without ever knowing what fully happened to her son, only that he was missing and possibly murdered. I cannot imagine the pain of a Mother’s grief, of not knowing what actually happened to her child, of someone that was once part of her body, just here today and gone tomorrow.
While it could be argued that Larry’s Mother is not around to know the pain of having to hear all the hype about Tiger King every five minutes, the rest of his family is. What producers and other content creators sometimes don’t realize, but it was especially true in this case, is that when making documentaries about true stories, especially stories that involve horrific crimes, they need to actively make an effort to consult all the family members and check with them to see if they even want their loved one’s name mentioned in a documentary. Someone’s mental and emotional pain doesn’t need to be profited off of.
It’s bad enough that the animals themselves get abused in this documentary, but what of the people who truly were victims in all of this? Personally, I think Larry Nash deserves his own documentary from Netflix. From what I can tell, he had a life that was well worth documenting, he was an interesting human being and if they can document a drug kingpin’s lifestyle, then why not give the good guy, the guy who essentially died to keep a lot of people safe, equal airtime? After all, they mentioned the story and opened the wound afresh, so they should follow up on this and make sure that this family gets the truth. They have the resources and if people are eating up Tiger King, then they’d certainly want to go for a sequel, wouldn’t they? Sounds like it to me, but you decide.
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