When Jessica Bond Ferguson’s 16-year-old son told her he thought he saw a monkey running in the yard outside their home near Heidelberg, Mississippi, on Sunday morning, she got out of bed, grabbed her firearm and her cellphone and stepped outside. There, she saw a rhesus monkey standing about 60 feet away. It was one of the lab monkeys that escaped last week after a truck overturned on a Mississippi highway in Jasper County.
She said that she and other residents had been warned that the escaped monkeys carried diseases, so she fired her gun, killing it.
“I did what any other mother would do to protect her children,” Bond Ferguson, who has five children ranging in age from 4 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.”
On Oct. 28, the same day the wreck happened, the Mississippi Free Press reported that Tulane University officials had refuted initial claims that the monkeys carried diseases like herpes, COVID-19 and hepatitis C—but not before dozens of local, national and international news publications had reported the false claim about diseased monkeys as fact.
The Jasper County Sheriff’s Office confirmed in a social media post that a homeowner had found one of the monkeys on their property Sunday morning, but said the office didn’t have any details. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks took possession of the monkey, the sheriff’s office said.
Before Bond Ferguson had gone out the door, she had called the police and was told to keep an eye on the monkey. But she said worried that if the monkey got away, it would threaten children at another house.
“If it attacked somebody’s kid, and I could have stopped it, that would be a lot on me,” said Bond Ferguson, a 35-year-old professional chef. “It’s kind of scary and dangerous that they are running around, and people have kids playing in their yards.”
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 university. In a statement last week, Tulane said the monkeys do not belong to the university, and they were not being transported by the university.
A truck carrying the monkeys overturned on Tuesday on Interstate 59 north of Heidelberg. Of the 21 monkeys in the truck, 13 were found at the scene of the accident and arrived at their original destination last week, according to Tulane. Another five were killed in the hunt for them and three remained on the loose before Sunday.
The Mississippi Highway Patrol has said it was investigating the cause of the crash, which occurred about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the state capital, Jackson.
Rhesus monkeys typically weigh about 16 pounds (7.2 kilograms) and are among the most medically studied animals on the planet. 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.
Jasper County Sheriff Randy Johnson had said Tulane officials reported the monkeys were not infectious, despite initial reports by the truck’s occupants and the sheriff’s department warning that the monkeys were dangerous and harboring various diseases. Nonetheless, Johnson said the monkeys still needed to be “neutralized” because of their aggressive nature.
The monkeys had recently received checkups confirming they were pathogen-free, Tulane said in a statement Wednesday.
Rhesus macaques “are known to be aggressive,” according to the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks. It said the agency’s conservation workers were working with sheriff’s officials in the search for the animals.
The search comes 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.
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Mississippi Free Press News Editor Ashton Pittman made additions to this report regarding MFP’s reporting on the story.