8 January. (Attacks #12 and 13; death #6) 35-year-old Mark Jeffrey Reynolds, an amateur mountain bike racer, was reported as being killed by a mountain lion sometime after 1:25 p.m. at Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park in southern Orange County. His bicycle was later found with the chain unbroken, but off the sprockets. Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, speculated that Mark was attacked as he was fixing his bike.
However, the autopsy results apparently show no damage to his neck at all, or any damage indicative of an actual attack that caused his death.
The speculation that fits the facts best is that Mark had a heart attack while riding his bike, fell off his bike, causing the chain to fall off the sprockets. The cougar then simply scavenged him while he was dead on the ground. Unfortunately, as is typically the case for lion feeding, the heart was missing, so we'll never know for sure if he did have a heart attack.
Later the same day, Anne Hjelle, 30, of Santa Ana, a former Marine who works as a fitness instructor, was jumped by the same mountain lion. Anne was attacked a short distance down the trail from Mark's body, which was not visible to her, while she was riding her mountain bicycle. The lion jumped her from a slight rise (~4 feet) on the right hand side of the trail, from under some high brush. The lion quickly had Anne's face in its mouth, despite the presence of Anne's helmet. Her riding companion, Debi Nicholls, was about 30 feet behind Anne and witnessed the attack. Debi threw her bike at the mountain lion, to no avail, then grabbed Anne's legs and screamed as the lion dragged both of them 30 feet down the slope into the brush. The lion kept attacking Anne, alternating between her helmet, face and neck. The screams brought Nils Magnuson, 33, of Long Beach, and Mike Castellano to the scene, who called 911 and scared off the mountain lion by throwing rocks at it.
Anne was airlifted to Mission Hospital. Her condition was initially critical, was upgraded from serious as of early 9 January, and to fair as of 10 January.
Nils was nearby since he had just found Mark's bicycle, and was about to look for Mark. (Mountain bikers crash fairly frequently, so finding a crashed bicycle is not an unusual occurrence. It is customary to stop and render aid to crashees.) After this attack, Mark's body was found dead higher on the trail than where Anne was attacked. Mark had apparently been dead for some hours, and his body had been half-eaten and partially buried, typical of a mountain lion kill.
Later that night, Sheriff's deputies shot and killed a healthy 3- to 4-year-old, 110-122 pound male lion, which was spotted 50 yards from the man's body. Initial tests found human skin tissue, and portions of a human lung and liver in the lion's stomach, which were confirmed later to match Mark's DNA. No fibers from Anne's clothing, nor any slivers from her helmet, were found in the initial examination, but later DNA tests matched Anne to the blood on one of the lion's claws. Curiously, no deer hairball was found in the lion.
Also that night, about four miles north of these attacks, a second mountain lion, a 70 pound female, was hit by a car and killed. This lion was not involved in either attack.
Although Whiting Ranch was closed for two days about a year earlier due to the sighting of a mountain lion and her two young cubs, the lion linked to the attacks could not have been one of those cubs, due to its age.
Eric Sanderson reports that many deer frequent Whiting Ranch, so there was a plentiful supply of the normal food resource for a cougar. Eric routinely sees a couple of deer on each of his noontime rides.
For readers not in Southern California, Whiting Ranch is in Orange County, 44 air miles southeast from the city of Los Angeles and 71 air miles north of the city of San Diego. More precisely, the park is between the city of Irvine and the Cleveland National Forest (Thomas Brothers Map #862, G5).
Franko, of Franko's Maps, has kindly provided a map of Whiting Ranch on which I have plotted the location of the attack and of the killing of the cougar.
Sources: an anonymous mountain biker (email of 2/3/04); Nils Magnuson (personal emails of 1/17/04 and 1/23/04), Eric Sanderson (personal emails of 1/10/04, 1/11/04, 1/16/04 and 1/26/04); L.A. Times, 1/27/04; 1/11/04 (online story); 1/10/04, A1, A19; an anonymous mountain bike rider (see below); Signon San Diego 1/9/04, 10:30 pm; L.A. Times 1/9/04, A1; CBS News / AP; KNBC-TV News Report, 11 pm, 1/8/04; L.A. Times; NBC News; secondhand private communications of the autopsy results.
The following information was written before I learned about the autopsy results, and hence should be read with the possibility in mind that Mark died of a heart attack, not a cougar attack:
The time of Mark's death is surprisingly uncertain. The initial report claimed he had been dead "many hours to many days", which was probably a result of the cougar partially burying the body (as pointed out by Eric Sanderson). After the body was identified, the time shifted to "noon". However a mountain bike rider (who prefers to remain anonymous) reported to me that he rode down the Cactus Hill Trail at 1:25 pm, as recorded by his bicycle computer. He talked with Nils afterward, and they both concluded that he would have seen Mark's bike if it had been there then. He has communicated this information to the coroner's office and other officials.
Unfortunately, we still don't know for sure how Mark was attacked. Although the papers reported that the bicycle chain had "broken", Nils (personal communication 1/23/04) said that the chain was intact when he found Mark's bike, with the chain simply hanging off the sprockets.
Thus it is possible that Mark's chain came off the sprockets, and he was bending down to put it back on when he was attacked. It certainly is plausible that he was attacked when he was in this position, and not easily able to defend himself after the initial lion attack.
Alternatively, the lion could have jumped Mark in the same way Anne was jumped, with the chain coming off the sprockets during the ensuing melee.
Nils Magnuson provides information that makes the second scenario more likely:
The bike was standing upright, just to the right of the trail, facing slightly at an angle down the slope. On the down slope, the dirt was disrupted in two areas as if someone had taken two steps down. About 5 yards down was thick cactus. If you were standing, looking at the bike, very tall, thick bushes lined your backside.
I could speculate many different attack scenarios. The only thing I found wrong with the bike was that the chain was off. Most people simply put the chain back on and spin the cranks once, not even setting the bike off to the side of the trail. As a matter of fact, where the bike was it would be hard to put the chain back on. One could speculate that maybe the bike was lying across the trail and that someone earlier had set the bike on the side of the trail. In any case, the spot where the bike was wasn't a good place to stop. It's really narrow. I would have gone either way on the trail, about 5 yards, before doing anything to my bike.
The autopsy report might be able to distinguish between these two possibilities, but nothing has been released from the autopsy report that sheds any light on this.
A very puzzling thing about this incident is the multiple attacks. No scenario seems compelling:
One possibility is that Anne was the first person to come by the kill afterwards, and the lion was "protecting" its kill by attacking anything that came close. However, this lion undoubtedly had seen many mountain bikers before, and I doubt it was going to keep attacking every biker that came by to "protect" its kill.
Another possibility is that the lion was still "hyped" from the previous attack, and was still in "attack mode" when the next biker, Anne, came by, who was then attacked. This possibility becomes more likely as the time of Mark's death gets later.
If Anne was not the first person to come by the kill afterwards, it is hard to explain why she was attacked and not anyone before her. The only explanation that comes to mind is that perhaps this mountain lion was still part of a family group, and decided to get another meal for others in that family group. (I doubt that this is normal mountain lion behavior, especially for a 3-year-old lion, but nothing seems very normal here.) Otherwise, it is hard to explain why another mountain lion was nearby, because the density of mountain lions is very low. In the entire Santa Ana range of about 10 miles by 30 miles, there are only about 20 mountain lions.
In this scenario, perhaps the lion had rested for a while, and Anne's timing was just unfortunate.
Speculations that the local mountain lion population was disturbed by the influx of outsiders from the San Diego County burn areas are unfounded. It is extremely unlikely that any mountain lions from the main burn areas in San Diego County migrated to Orange County, due to the following:
the distance involved (Whiting Ranch is 60-80 miles from the main burn areas);
most cougars who try to cross I-15 die (see Massive Concrete Mountain Lion Barrier Wall at Rainbow Creek on I-15); and
most of the wildlife survived the San Diego County fires, and is still hanging around at least the perimeter of the burn areas. For example, 10 of 11 radio-collared deer survived the fires in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, one of whom was later killed by a cougar. Undoubtedly, most of the cougars in the area survived as well and are still near that location.
It is possible that the cougar density in Orange County was slightly increased after the Camp Pendleton fire, since that location is "only" 20-25 miles away. However, that fire burned only 6,892 acres, an utterly negligible amount compared to the 256,000 acres contained in an area 20 miles on a side.
Mountain lions, like any predator, do not attack prey that can harm them for fun. Attacking any animal is risky business, and predators attack only the minimum number of the easiest targets they can find, due to the risk of injury to themselves. After all, if a predator becomes disabled for hunting for any period of time, they will starve to death.
Of course, some animals do play with their victims, or even attack creatures that cannot harm them for fun. Domestic cats are the poster animals for such attacks. But I seriously doubt that most mountain lions are going to attack a deer or human for fun on a general basis, although one can never rule out such an attack by an unusual individual.
I thank an anonymous reader with good insights who helped me speculate on the causes of this multiple attack.
The speculation that Mark had a heart attack makes everything falls into place: the cougar attacked only a single human, to protect its food cache, and there is nothing unusual about the second attack anymore.
