May 22, 2012

Mountain Lion Killed in Santa Monica

The Los Angeles Times is reporting late today:

State Fish and Game officers killed a mountain lion Tuesday that had tried to escape from the courtyard of a Santa Monica office building where it had wandered hours earlier.

The officers killed the cat out of concern for public safety, according to KTLA News.

The animal was originally spotted about 6 a.m. on Arizona Avenue in downtown Santa Monica. Officers tried to tranquilize it, but the mountain lion kept trying to jump over a fence.

The animal was believed to be a juvenile female, weighing less than 100 pounds. It had wandered into the courtyard of an office building at 1227 2nd St., startling a janitor, Santa Monica police said.

For a time the animal was contained in the courtyard, and Fish and Game wardens were called. As a precaution, police closed 2nd Street to vehicle and pedestrian traffic between Arizona Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.

Authorities said it’s not unusual for wild animals such as deer and raccoons to stray into the city from the nearby Santa Monica Mountains. But they said it was the first big cat they had seen in the area.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

Filed under Breaking News, CryptoZoo News, Mystery Cats, Out of Place, Weird Animal News