Response to coyote attack involving girl in SF's Botanical Gardens questioned: Why was a pup shot?
We want to warn you -- this story has some unsettling images
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- "It bit me." The words of a five-year-old girl after a coyote attack in San Francisco's Botanical Gardens this past summer.
GIRL: "And then I started to cry and run back in my group."
MOTHER: "You got up and ran? Okay."
GIRL: "After it bit me."
The ABC7 I-Team has obtained that recording along with other exclusive videos, and hundreds of pages of internal documents that raise questions about the incident. Did park officials know about the danger beforehand and fail to take action? And, was shooting three coyotes living in the gardens really necessary?
DNA testing proves the first coyote that trackers shot was the offender - a one-year-old male. But they also went on to shoot and kill a four-month-old female pup. And, their mother appears to be walking around right now with a gunshot wound to her chest.
Right after a coyote nipped a 5-year-old girl at San Francisco's Botanical Gardens on June 28, local, state, and federal agencies sprang into action. Among hundreds of pages of documents obtained under the Public Records Act from Recreation and Parks, Animal Care and Control, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the US Department of Agriculture, we found a line that the mother provided investigators "with a video of her daughter" explaining what happened. She gave the I-Team a copy.
The mother confirmed to me that her daughter dressed as a rainbow butterfly was playing in the trees here, at the edge of Moon Viewing Garden next to the Conifer Lawn.
She told me, other kids spotted the coyote coming through the woods and ran away. When her daughter finally saw it and started to run, she tripped and the coyote nipped her on the bottom. She suffered two puncture wounds - one required two stitches to close, the other bled just a little; the coyote later tested negative for rabies. A gardener told investigators the coyote, identified as one-year-and-one month-old, "lunged several times towards the other kids" before he was able to chase it away.
DAN NOYES: "You knew this family of coyotes."
JANET KESSLER: "I did."
Janet Kessler took pictures of the coyote family in the Botanical Gardens the month before the attack. She's been tracking coyotes around San Francisco for 17 years and developed a map showing the different packs, close to a hundred coyotes in all. Kessler believes the coyote that day exhibited normal "denning behavior" - that it was protecting the area around its home that contained pups.
"Raising a family of pups is a family affair," Kessler explains. "The yearlings help with feeding them, with teaching them, with playing with them, with guarding them. It's not just the parents who do this."
RELATED: 3 coyotes shot, killed after 5-year-old attacked at SF Botanical Garden
The I-Team obtained one internal email from an Animal Care and Control staffer saying that Rec and Parks has some explaining to do: "They need to speak to how the Botanical Gardens are arranged, and what they did to keep coyotes and kid camps apart. There's been a den there for years, and they were aware."
DAN NOYES: "Your own staff is saying that they have to answer for why they didn't keep the coyotes and the kids camp apart. Do you agree with what your staff was saying?"
VIRGINIA DONOHUE, SF ANIMAL CARE AND CONTROL: "I, I think moving forward, there's a question of can we control to some extent where the dens are? That's very, very difficult to do."
DAN NOYES: "Why control where the dens are? Why not control where the kids are?"
VIRGINIA DONOHUE: "You can control where the-the kids are all, the dens and coyotes are all over Golden Gate Park."
If that's the case, should the camp counselor have been keeping closer watch? She told investigators she was standing along this paved path with several kids, while other campers - including the 5-year-old victim -- were across the lawn playing in or near those woods.
DAN NOYES: "It's got to be 50, 60 feet away at least. She was not there with this kid who was playing in the woods."
VIRGINIA DONOHUE: "Well, I'm not going to throw the counselor under the bus here."
DAN NOYES: "You know, I'm not trying to. I'm just trying to figure out what happened and how we can fix this moving forward."
Next, we tried to speak with Stephanie Linder, CEO of the Botanical Gardens, about what, if any changes she's making to her camp programs that run up to $1,300 for a 10-day session. She declined an on-camera interview but emailed, "Decisions about whether to close the Gardens or sections of the Gardens for public safety are made by SF Recreation & Park, not my organization. We are the nonprofit partner to SF Recreation & Park."
We also traded emails with Rec and Parks spokesperson Tamara Aparton, but she did not respond to requests for an interview with her or General Manager Phil Ginsburg. The documents show that Aparton explained the attack in an email to one reporter, "It is currently pupping season, so coyotes may exhibit more protective behavior."
Virginia Donohue of SF Ainimal Care and Control said, "There have been dens in the Botanic Gardens without incident for many, many years."
That's not true, according to Jamie Carlson. "I'm grabbing the baby and he's right here, and I'm backing out and I'm screaming, screaming, screaming."
Four years ago -- in the exact same spot where the June attack occurred -- Carlson was wrapping up a picnic with her two-year-old grandson. She walked to the stroller about ten feet away when this coyote charged him; another mom recorded the aftermath. There's the coyote, and that's Carlson holding her grandson tight. She tells me she snatched the little boy up just as the coyote arrived - she later saw two indentations on his back, what she believes were fang marks.
JAMIE CARLSON: "That's how close it was."
DAN NOYES: "It was a nanosecond. If you were just a nanosecond slower, it could have been much worse."
JAMIE CARLSON: "I know. I didn't sleep for a while. The takeaway is, are we waiting for this to happen again? I did not feel that they took my story seriously or did much about it."
Then in 2021, a camera caught a popular coyote nicknamed "Carl" stalking a child feeding the ducks in the Botanical Gardens. He lunged at the boy. A sniper later killed Carl as he emerged from his den - the same den the coyote family used from the attack in June, according to the documents we obtained.
"The whole thing is just riddled with untruths," saiid animal advocate Kim Forwood. "And a creative narrative is what the situation is."
MORE: 'This is a serious problem': Coyote wanders dangerously close to toddlers in SF's Golden Gate Park
Forwood has been using her blog to question the decision to shoot not only the offending coyote, but two others. Internal documents show San Francisco paid a USDA trapper $7,500 to use his rifle with silencer and infrared scope, and he "took a male adult they believed was the most likely coyote involved in the attack".
DAN NOYES: "And that first night, he says, I shot who I believe is the offender. Why not stop there?"
STEVE GONZALEZ, CA DEPT. OF FISH AND WILDLIFE: "Whether he believes that or however he feels, that's up to him."
The trapper sent a DNA sample to be compared to a swab taken from the five-year-old girl's wound. But, he continued the hunt and killed a four-month-old female pup. Fish and Wildlife's investigation report concludes, "The coyote pup was too small to have been the offending coyote."
DAN NOYES: "The second coyote he took was a four-month-old female pup. Why shoot the puppy?"
STEVE GONZALEZ: "So, it's really hard to you know, I'm not going to second guess the tracker, but it's hard to tell the ages of these coyotes."
The internal documents show a UC Davis researcher questioned, "Why did they shoot a pup?" An Animal Care and Control staffer answered, "I have no idea. ... Taking the pup out of the bag was so awful." The report included a photo of the little body in a garbage bag stored next to her brother, the yearling.
"I mean these are dogs, wild dogs," Kim Forwood said. "If you think of, like, your domesticated dogs and you get them when they're like two to four months old or something, if you get them when they're puppies, I mean, that's what they shot."
DAN NOYES: "The other times they've had to do this. Have they taken just the offending animal, or have they taken other coyotes at the same time?"
VIRGINIA DONOHUE: "The only two other occasions I know about, they've taken just the offending animal."
The shooting continued into a second night, the USDA trapper reporting he "took an adult female coyote that was associated with the adult male coyote and pup." He couldn't find the body but, "We collected blood, so there is a coyote somewhere dead in the garden."
One week later, Janet Kessler's field cameras caught what she says is the mother and father of that coyote family coming back into the Botanical Gardens. And she snapped a photo of the female. Kessler suspects this is a bullet wound from that government hunter.
"I don't know if that is from a bullet," Kessler said. "It looked like it was. I asked people who knew about this kind of wound, and they said it definitely looked like that's what it was."
Steve Gonzalez of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife responded, "In this case, a difficult decision was made, but it was the right decision whether that was the bullet or whether it wasn't the bullet. We always err on the side of public safety."
Gonzalez says the trapper had to continue taking coyotes until the DNA test confirmed the first one he shot was the offender. I also asked Gonzalez why his agency put out information that led to stories like this one in the Chronicle: "Coyotes killed in S.F. after attack did not have pups, raising questions about aggression".
DAN NOYES: "We know that's not true now, right?
STEVE GONZALEZ: "I don't think we could say that. So, what happens a lot of the times in these cases people feed animals."
There's no mention in the hundreds of pages of investigative reports, texts and emails that coyote feeding played any role in this case.
DAN NOYES: "What do you think about how they handled this?"
JANETT KESSLER: "I'm sad about it. When talking about coyotes, it's important to be really level, to tell the truth. They could have said, look, we made a mistake, there was a den here. They've never corrected their mistakes."
The 5-year-old victim's mother tells us, "We enjoy sharing our city with wildlife and it's a shame that this incident happened, and animals were killed."
The official San Francisco policy for coyotes is peaceful coexistence. We have to alter our behavior at times, if we're going to avoid problems like this one and others we've been seeing.
