BITE OUT OF CRIME
Cop wrestles coyote off girl, 5
After tot Natalia Petrellese was attacked by a coyote in a Westchester park Sunday, Officer Arcangelo Liberatore grabbed the animal (inset), saving her life.
A coyote attacked a 5-year-old girl at a Westchester County playground — prompting a fearless off-duty cop to tackle and wrestle with the beast to save the child.
“It was a primal instinct. I was in a different mindset,” Irvington Police Officer Arcangelo Liberatore told The Post on Monday, crediting his training in jiu-jitsu with helping him restrain the animal.
Kasey King-Petrellese said she and her two children were near the baseball field at James Carroll Park in Mount Pleasant at 4 p.m. Sunday when the animal darted at full speed toward them and then chomped down on her daughter Natalia’s left arm.
“It lunged at us,” said King-Petrellese, 36, of Hawthorne. “The first thing that came to my mind was, ‘ They go for little things.’
“My son was the smallest, so I picked him up and grabbed [my daughter] by the arm. I kicked [the coyote] right in its face as hard as I could, and he fell down and stumbled a bit.”
But the kick didn’t stop the wild animal from latching onto Natalia and trying to drag her away as her mother screamed in horror.
Liberatore — who was at the park with his wife and two kids — heard the mom’s screams and ran to help.
The quick-thinking officer said he jumped on the coyote and held it down as he punched it “to daze it” while also trying to suffocate it to keep it from injuring anyone else.
“I just made sure my gravity was kind of low and just kind of squeezed the heck out of it. I was basically strangling it,” he said.
“If you control the neck, you control the entire body. And so literally, I was just holding it down by its head so it couldn’t go anywhere.”
He held the coyote down for five minutes, until Mount Pleasant police officers arrived and killed it with a shotgun. The animal’s corpse was then sent it to the Westchester County Department of Health for rabies and other testing.
Liberatore sustained a hand wound while restraining the animal and received stitches and 10 rabies shots. Natalia was rushed to a hospital, where she received five stitches, antibiotics and rabies shots.
“I got stitches, and I was so brave,’’ the little girl told The Post. “My daddy told me it’s never gonna happen again. But if there is another [coyote] I’m gonna kick it in its nose.”
Meanwhile, her mother hailed Liberatore.
“Going back to help another person I think takes a lot of courage and bravery, and I am forever thankful and grateful for that,” King-Petrellese said.
John Nesti of Fischer Wildlife Control and Repairs — which has dealt with a recent flood of coyote calls in New York and New Jersey — said the animals become more aggressive in the suburbs, where they are not hunted by people.
“The more that coyotes are around humans and nothing negative happens to them, the more they’re going to attack people,” he said.
“In Westchester, there are a lot of areas where you can’t hunt, so they fear humans less.”