Police alert USU community after mountain lion sighting
This morning, an alert was sent out notifying those at Utah State University’s Logan campus there was a mountain lion sighted on campus. The animal has since been contained and removed from the area.
At around 6 a.m., a call was made to the Logan City Police Department reporting the sighting of a mountain lion near the Student Living Center on campus around 1000 N. 1200 E. in Logan.
After the original call was made, USU police sent an officer to the area to confirm the sighting. The officer saw the mountain lion running through the Logan Cemetery and towards the area around Aggie Village.
Once the sighting was confirmed by the officer, an alert was sent out at 7:38 a.m. through the Aggie Alert system. The safety alert read, “Mountain lion sighting in the area of Aggie Village Logan Campus.”
Lt. Shane Nebeker from USU police explained why the department felt the need to send out an alert for this situation.
“At that time of day, we’ve got little kids going to school, we got buses, we got people leaving to go to class,” Nebeker said. “That was the reasoning behind the Aggie Alert.”
USU and Logan police continued to track the mountain lion off campus and towards 1400 N.
It was then that a second Aggie Alert was sent out at 8:31 a.m.
This alert read, “Authorities have confirmed an additional sighting of the mountain lion off campus. The related monitoring activity has moved east of USU Logan Campus. All clear, no updates to follow.”
“The second Aggie alert went out basically to say, ‘Hey, we know where the cat is now and that it is off of campus,’” Nebeker said. “That was the reason for the all clear.”
Around 9 a.m., the mountain lion was contained in the backyard of a home near 1450 N. and 1500 E. The animal lay down in the backyard as the police officers who contained it waited for the Department of Wildlife Resources to arrive.
When the DWR arrived a little after 10 a.m., their experts tranquilized the mountain lion and then removed it from the backyard to return it to the wild.
Nebeker said typically DWR does a check up on the animal’s health before returning it to the wild.