Bystanders rush to help boy in coyote attack
Runners, walkers defend, provide aid in Lincoln Park
Andersonville resident Maryanne Metz and a friend were finishing up a stroll through Lincoln Park along a deserted but scenic dirt path Wednesday afternoon when they heard children screaming.
“It sounded like many children. Like a schoolyard would sound … highpitched voices,” said Metz, who didn’t think much of it because she assumed they were classmates on a school trip.
As they walked on, suddenly they spotted a woman yelling at the top of her lungs who was slowly walking backward, holding a child in her arms.
Then they saw the “scrawnier than a wolf ” and “limping” coyote, which didn’t make a sound and had the boy’s little shoe hanging from its jaws.
“It wasn’t that big, and it looked not to be well, actually,” she said.
“She was just screaming. Screaming. She was trying to scare the coyote away. She didn’t want to turn her back on the coyote,” Metz said.
“We could see the boy was bleeding very badly,” she said.
Metz’s friend scooped up a large branch that was lying on the ground and charged toward the coyote.
“She ran, chasing it with the stick,” Metz said, adding that her friend’s bold move didn’t surprise her. “Adrenaline kicked in, and she was so angry.”
Meanwhile, two runners on DePaul University’s track and field team had nearly finished their 10-mile route in Lincoln Park when they also heard screams coming from a path near the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.
They halted their practice and dashed over to find the young boy, crying and bleeding, as a large coyote hovered about 15 feet away and then ran into the bushes.
“We just ran over there instinctively … and just saw a kid bleeding from his head, all over his jacket, all over his face,” said Ryan Taylor, a 19-year-old sophomore, as he recounted the experience Thursday afternoon during an interview in the campus athletic center.
Taylor and Dominic Bruce, also a 19-year-old sophomore, are credited with helping the boy in the aftermath of the attack, thought to be the first in the city in at least a decade.
Bruce said he took off his sweatshirt and wrapped it around the boy’s head to stanch the bleeding. Fearing the coyote might return, he said he swung a stick around to keep the animal away.
Metz spotted a CTA bus that was stopped, and they ran and boarded it. The driver called another driver, who brought a bottle of water. They found some tissues and applied pressure to his head until the paramedics arrived, she said.
After a few minutes, they heard sirens so Metz got off the bus and directed emergency responders to “go into the cul de sac,” where the bus was parked.
The paramedics cleaned the blood off the boy’s face, wrapped his head in bandages and loaded the boy, whose face was “white as a sheet,” into an ambulance after contacting his parents.
“He was such a brave little boy. He was scared and bleeding all over. And yet he seemed fairly calm.”
The runners said they hope the boy is recovering well at Lurie Children’s Hospital.
“It was terrible to watch this kid go through so much pain. … I’m really proud of him for just being OK, just getting through it all, just being very patient with authorities,” Taylor said.
Animal control workers caught a coyote Thursday evening on Chicago’s North Side, but authorities said it might not be known for weeks whether it’s the same animal that attacked the 6-year-old boy the day before about 2 miles away.