He’s one “Wile E.” coyote!
NYPD cops spent more that an hour running after a coyote that made its way onto the grounds of a co-op building next to a church in Chelsea on Tuesday morning.
A resident walking his Yorkie first spotted the wild beast and alerted James Dempsey and Jose Calderon, who work on the grounds of the apartment building at 28th Street and Ninth Avenue.
“I thought he was kidding. But it was a coyote!” exclaimed Dempsey, 53, who is grounds manager of the co-op.
Calderon said he saw the coyote dart past him and quickly shut one of the building’s gates, locking him inside the grounds of the co-op.
“I was, like, stunned,” said Calderon, 32, who works as a gardener. “[The coyote] ran right past me. I just stiffened up — and shut the gate fast.
“It was Wile E. Coyote!”
Dempsey added that the coyote was “huge.
“He looked like a big German shepherd from a distance,” he said. “But when you got close, you saw he was wild.”
Dempsey contacted building security, which alerted the city’s Animal Care & Control agency. A passer-by also told Police Officer Michael Zytkowicz about the coyote, and he called it in.
Authorities from the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unitarrived at the scene around 8:30 a.m. armed with snares and dart guns to capture the crafty creature.
After more than an hour, three cops finally managed to shoot the coyote with a dart gun and place it inside a cage unconscious.
“When we felt it was safe enough, we used our animal noose to capture the animal, and then we placed him in an animal containment box and had him taken out to the center for animal control so they could, I guess, evaluate his health and his future,” said Detective Robert Mirfield, who helped rescue the animal.
“He didn’t want to get captured,” he added.
The canine appeared strong and healthy, and was taken to an Animal Care & Control Center on the Upper East Side for evaluation.
“It was cool — it was like TV, watching them catch the animals,” Calderon said. “That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
Cops aren’t sure how the coyote managed to make his way to Chelsea, but believe he might have crossed one of Manhattan’s many bridges.
“There’s dozens of them, dozens of tunnels, pick any one of them,” Mirfield said. “I’m sure he could have ran across them in the middle of the night.”
It’s still unclear when and where the coyote will released.
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