U.S. Woman Shot and Killed an Escaped Lab Monkey to ‘Protect Her Children’

Remember those monkeys from last week? The lab monkeys that escaped a crashed truck that, for a moment, everyone thought were riddled with disease? A Mississippi woman shot one of the remaining escapees when it appeared in her yard.

It started when a truck carrying 21 Rhesus macaques used as test subjects for biomedical research flipped over on Interstate 59. It sounds like the setup for a zombie movie, but it was actually much tamer than that. The monkeys were not riddled with illness, and there was no chance they would spread disease, though the local authorities said they were “aggressive.”

Five were killed in the chaos of it all, while the rest scattered into the brush. 13 were recovered, and three remained unaccounted for as of Sunday morning.

Escaped Lab Monkey Shot and Killed by Mississippi Woman

The Associated Press reports that 35-year-old professional chef and mom, Jessica Bond Ferguson, is the mother of a 16-year-old boy who spotted one of the monkeys in their yard. Having heard the warnings of potentially diseased monkeys, which turned out to be false, Ferguson called the cops, but not before grabbing her gun and confronting the monkey. When it refused to back off, she fired two rounds at it.

The Jasper County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the monkey’s death and said wildlife officials took the body. Tulane University, whose name was initially tied to the escaped primates, quickly clarified that it didn’t own them. They just came from a research facility that supplies labs.

Monkey outbreaks seem to be happening a lot lately. You might remember last year when 43 macaques busted out of a South Carolina breeding compound because someone forgot to lock a gate. Those were eventually recaptured, but not before fueling a week of paranoid headlines.