Jessica Bond Ferguson said her 16-year-old told her about animal in the yard and she shot it to ‘protect her children’
One of the monkeys that escaped after a truck overturned on a Mississippi roadway on 28 October was shot and killed early on Sunday by a homeowner who said she feared for the safety of her children.
Jessica Bond Ferguson said she was alerted early on 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 of bed, grabbed her firearm and her cellphone, and stepped outside where she saw the monkey about 60ft (18 meters) away.
Bond said she and other residents had been warned that the escaped monkeys were potentially diseased, so she fired her gun.
“I did what any other mother would do to protect her children,” Bond, who has five children ranging in age from four 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 on Sunday morning but said the office did not have any details. The Mississippi department of wildlife, Fisheries, and parks took possession of the monkey, the sheriff’s office said.
The rhesus monkeys had been housed at the Tulane University National Biomedical Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, which routinely provides primates to scientific research organizations, according to the school. In a statement, Tulane University said the monkeys did not belong to the university, and they were not being transported by the university.
The Jasper sheriff’s office initially said the monkeys were carrying diseases including herpes, citing information from the overturned truck’s occupants. But Tulane said in a statement later that the monkeys “have not been exposed to any infectious agent”.
The monkeys had recently received checkups confirming they were pathogen-free, Tulane’s statement said.
Johnson, nonetheless, said the monkeys still needed to be “neutralized” because of their aggressive nature.
Rhesus macaques “are known to be aggressive,” according to the Mississippi department of wildlife, fisheries and parks. The department said its conservation workers were working with law enforcement officials in the search for the animals.
After also initially reporting that all but one monkey had been killed, the sheriff’s office said that three monkeys remained at large and were being searched for.
Rhesus monkeys typically weigh about 16lbs (7.2kg) and are among the most medically studied animals in the world. Video recorded after the crash showed monkeys crawling through tall grass beside the interstate, where wooden crates labeled “live animals” were crumpled and strewn about.
The crash in Mississippi came about one year after 43 rhesus macaques escaped from a South Carolina compound that breeds them for medical research because an employee didn’t fully lock an enclosure. Employees from the Alpha Genesis facility in Yemassee, South Carolina, had set up traps to capture them.
