Heidelberg, Mississippi (AP) — One of the monkeys that escaped last week after a truck overturned on a Mississippi roadway was shot and killed early Sunday by a homeowner who says she feared for the safety of her children.
Jessica Bond Ferguson said she was alerted early Sunday by her 16-year-old son, who said he thought he had seen a monkey running in the yard outside their home near Heidelberg, Mississippi.
She got out bed, grabbed her firearm and her cellphone and stepped outside where she saw the monkey about 60 feet away.
Bond Ferguson said she and other residents had been warned that the escaped monkeys carried diseases so she fired her gun.
“I did what any other mother would do to protect her children,” Bond Ferguson, who has five children ranging in age from 4 to 16, told The Associated Press. “I shot at it and it just stood there, and I shot again, and he backed up and that’s when he fell.”
The Jasper County Sheriff’s Office confirmed in a social media post that a homeowner had found one of the monkeys on their property Sunday morning but said the office didn’t have any details. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks took possession of the monkey, the sheriff’s office said.
Before Bond Ferguson had gone out the door, she had called the police and was told to keep an eye on the monkey. But she said worried that if the monkey got away it would threaten children at another house.
“If it attacked somebody’s kid, and I could have stopped it, that would be a lot on me,” said Bond Ferguson, a 35-year-old professional chef.
The Rhesus monkeys had been housed at the Tulane University National Biomedical Research Center …
