The San Jose Mercury News on Saturday had a story about the three victims of the Christmas Day tiger attack. According to the report, the dead teenager, Carlos Sousa Jr., was close friends with the younger of the two brothers who survived the attack, living for a time on the same street in San Jose. The Sousa family reportedly came to consider Paul Dhaliwal a bad influence on their son, who was two years younger, after Paul Dhaliwal was arrested three times in 2007 on charges ranging from smoking marijuana to reckless driving to resisting arrest. In another incident, Sousa was arrested for driving without a license; he was driving Dhaliwal’s car.

The Dhaliwal brothers continue to maintain they did nothing to provoke the tiger, which escaped from its enclosure Christmas Day and killed the 17-year-old Sousa and mauled the Dhaliwal brothers before being killed by police. Meanwhile, a court ruled that police requests to examine the brothers’ car and cell phones must be heard by a San Jose court.

Earlier last week, the Mercury News reported that Dhaliwal had telephoned Sousa’s mother to describe the attack. The story also reported that the necropsy of Tatiana the tiger — whose body weighed in at 250 pounds, not 350 as earlier reported — showed she had been hit three times by police bullets, and that her stomach was full from an earlier feeding.