It's been nearly 10 years since the "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin met an unfortunate end at the wrong end of a stingray's tail. Now, his cameraman is sharing the details of his last moments for the first time.

Popular camera man Justin Lyons told Australia's Studio Ten talk show (via The New York Daily News) that he and Irwin were in Australia's Great Barrier Reef to film a documentary when they came across a stingray. The ray was a "massive, 8-foot wide" stingray, according to Lyons, but despite its massive size, Lyons assured his fearless friend that it was a "normally very calm" animal, and he should swim up beside it.

That's when things took a bad turn: according to Us Weekly, the "calm" animal was anything but. "All of a sudden it propped on its front and started stabbing wildly with its tail, hundreds of strikes in a few seconds," Lyons recalls. "It probably thought that Steve's shadow was a tiger shark, which feeds on them very regularly ... I panned with the camera as the stingray swam away, I didn't even know it had caused any damage. It wasn't until I panned the camera back, that Steve was standing in a huge pool of blood, that I realized something had gone wrong."

Despite trying CPR on his friend for over an hour, Irwin couldn't be revived, and he died of the ray's puncture to his heart.

According to Lyons, too, everyone expected Irwin to die in some way like this, though not at the hands (or, more appropriately, tail) of a stingray: "He was so good with animals, nothing was going to get him. We thought he was going to live forever, but it would always be a crazy silly accident, and as it turns out that's exactly what it was," he said.

Watch the full interview below:

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