Two DePaul students jumped into action on Wednesday after a coyote attacked a young boy in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Track athletes Ryan Taylor and Dominic Bruce were wrapping up a run on Wednesday afternoon near the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum when they saw a 6-year-old child being attacked by a coyote.
“I was just reacting. I wasn’t going to fallout and let this kid get hurt even worse than it could have happened,” Taylor said.
Taylor and Bruce said they heard the child’s caregiver screaming as she tried to push the coyote off of the injured boy.
“I saw the coyote jumping up and down, and it scattered once we got there,” Bruce said.
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“I could see the kid’s head bleeding. There was blood all over his face,” Taylor added. “He was seriously hurt. He was crying.”
The students jumped into action, giving a sweatshirt to the boy to help stop the bleeding. Bruce picked up a tree branch and used it to keep the coyote away while Taylor called 911 and flagged down a CTA bus.
“I told the mom and child to please get on the bus,” Taylor said. “I said ‘protect your kid in case the coyote comes back.’”
There have been multiple coyote sightings and multiple coyote attacks in recent days, including one Thursday that caused Lincoln Park High School to go on lockdown.
While city officials say that coyote sightings aren’t altogether unusual, the aggressive nature of some of the encounters is troubling.
“The odd circumstance is that there was an attack, so that was concerning,” Chicago Animal Care and Control Executive Director Kelley Gandurski said.
For their part, Taylor and Bruce are simply happy they could help a child in desperate need of assistance.
“It was just lucky we were there to help them out,” Bruce said.
