‘We Need A Helicopter … And We Need Someone With A Gun’: 911 Cougar Attack Call

More details on last Saturday’s cougar attack on a 60-year-old woman on an upper Snoqualmie Valley trail are coming out, including how fellow cyclists fought the animal and their desperate 911 call, and they make for tough reading.

Kendal and Alexa McCorkle say that their mother Keri faces a “lifelong battle and a long road ahead to recovery” from the bites to her face, jaw and neck and that she suffered permanent nerve damage, KOMO News’s Hannah Knowles reported.

A photo Knowles tweeted shows a bandaged Keri on her feet and giving the thumbs up from the halls of Harborview Hospital, where she was treated and released.

Kendal and Alexa describe their mom as a “pillar in the women’s biking community” and that she was accompanied that day on the popular trail near the towns of North Bend, Snoqualmie and Fall City by four other women.

“Mom was in the middle of the train with two riders ahead and two riders behind her when she was tackled off her bike by a 75-pound cougar,” they state in a Gofundme post that has raised nearly $60,000 at the time of this writing late Friday morning.

“The cougar latched onto her lower jaw,” their account continues. “Her courageous friends quickly jumped to action to save her life as well as their own. Ultimately it was their quick thinking that saved her life. They spent the next 15 minutes trying to fight the animal off of her. Finally he released and the ladies were able to get the animal away from her and had to hold him down with a bike to keep him from continuing the attack. They held him down for about 30 minutes until officers arrived at the scene. Because of these heroic women, we still have our mom with us. We are forever grateful to them all.”

Another new story shares the 911 call that came from one of the cyclists.

“We need a helicopter on location and we need someone with a gun to kill the cougar,” one of the callers said, according to KOMO. “We are right now we have a bicycle on top of the cougar and he’s fighting back.”

The cougar was shot by a state fish and wildlife officer responding to the scene.

“The people on scene took immediate action to render aid, and one of our officers was able to arrive within minutes to continue medical aid and coordinate transport. We may have had a very different outcome without their heroic efforts,” WDFW Lieutenant Erik Olson said in an agency statement.

The animal was described as a 75-pound “young male” and its carcass was sent to a Washington State University lab to determine its body condition, test for disease and aging.

Hounds brought to the scene that afternoon could not locate a second reported cougar.

WDFW had no new updates on the incident, a spokeswoman said this hour.

The agency says cougar attacks are rare and offers tips on what to do in case of an encounter, but this latest one also occurred not far from the fatal 2018 attack on another cyclist, SJ Brooks.

A postmortem report on the 3-year-old animal involved in that incident “revealed no abnormalities that might have contributed to the animal’s unusual behavior.” WDFW also described the cougar as “lean, but its weight and body condition fall within a normal range for a cougar of its age.”

In 2022, a 9-year-old girl was attacked by a cougar in Northeast Washington and survived serious injuries, while last July an 8-year-old boy suffered minor injuries after being attacked while camping in Olympic National Park.