The wild night started in Mountain View's Rengstorff Park where the cougar was spotted. Officers then cornered it in an apartment complex just a block away. Police say they were lucky because the mountain lion ran down a driveway and into an apartment parking garage where they quickly shut the gate on it.
The mountain lion is fully grown with a radio collar around its neck. Police say it is the same lion that a puma tracking group has been following for several months.
This all started around 6:30 p.m. when people at nearby Rengstorff Park spotted the mountain lion while some soccer teams were holding practice. The field was immediately evacuated then suddenly residents at the apartments off of California Street spotted the cat.
"I was talking to my neighbor and they said, 'Hey, grab your son,' because my son was walking towards the building, so he was about 50 feet away. And I said, 'Why?' and he said, 'There's a puma right here' and so I walked around and then sure enough there was a lion probably between the distance between me and that car," said witness Tommy Jackson. "I was too busy trying grab my son to make sure he wasn't attacked."
Police said their plan was for the game warden to drive inside the garage, shut the gate behind him and use a dart gun to tranquilize the cat.
There have been reports of mountain lion sightings at North Shoreline Park, but that's about five miles away, so this cat likely wandered through several neighborhoods to get to the apartment complex where it was caught.
There was a shelter in place order, but few people wanted to obey it. Adding to the chaos, the electricity went out in the apartment complex where the lion was trapped.
