Sometime early on Monday morning the big cat walked out of Griffin Park and perhaps looking for a nice cool place to take a nap, decided to take up refuge in the crawlspace under Jason and Paula Archinaco’s white-walled contemporary home backing up to open space in Los Feliz.
P-22 probably wouldn’t have been discovered, but workers installing a security system came face-to-face with the mountain lion when one went under the house. The first worker who saw the lion scrambled out from under the house and took off “like a bat out of hell,” Armando Navarrete of the Los Angeles Animal Service told the Los Angeles Times.
I didn’t think for two seconds that it was a mountain lion in my house,” said Jason Archinaco. “If someone says Bigfoot’s in your house, you go, ‘Yeah,’ and you stick your head in there.”
Navarrete was the first official to arrive at the scene and thinking the critter was probably a bobcat, crawled under the house to get a look for himself. He got within 10-feet of the big cat. There was nothing else to do but call in backup, and soon there were California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) workers, a mass of reporters and even a helicopter news crew overhead.
CDFW spokeswoman Janice Mackey told The Washington Post the workers tried shooting non-lethal beanbags and tennis balls at P-22, just to get him to leave the premises, but he wasn’t interested. “It didn’t really faze him. He’s a big tough cat,” Mackey said. “He’s a lion, and he’s on the top of the food chain over here.”
Workers finally decided to leave the cat alone and let the neighborhood quiet down, and sure enough, on Tuesday morning when the CDFW returned, bringing a portable telemetry wand, P-22 had left the building.
Researchers had previously caught, collared, named and treated the mountain lion for mange before releasing him back into the wilds of Griffin Park. It is theorized he may have come down from the Santa Monica mountains, crossed over two busy freeways and entered Griffin Park in 2012.
P-22 has become a cult figure around Griffin Park and is quite the celebrity. He was featured in a photo spread by National Geographic photographer Steve Winter in 2013. Using remote cameras, he was photographed with the city lights and the world-famous Hollywood sign in the background.
