Every Parent's Strangest Nightmare
Mike Smith
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High in the Sandia Mountains, east of Albuquerque, is the Balsam Glade Picnic Ground, named early last century by Hugh A. Cooper, the man who also founded what is now Albuquerque’s Presbyterian Hospital. The campground is generally a peaceful place, set where the winding road to the mountains’ highest peak meets the dirt back route to the northern mountain village of Placitas. People go to Balsam Glade to picnic en route to the nearby Sandia Man Cave, or to escape the city’s heat.
People go to Balsam Glade to experience nature, and sometimes, they experience more of it than they could have ever possibly wanted.
On Saturday, May 17, 2008, a five-year-old boy named Jose Salazar, Jr. was walking along a hiking trail near Balsam Glade, with his parents following about twenty or thirty feet behind him. The boy wandered momentarily out of the direct sight of his mom and dad, Charlotte and Jose Salazar, and then, he screamed.
"We looked at each other because that wasn't a normal scream; it wasn't a scream we'd heard before," the boy's father, Jose Salazar, said in an interview on Albuquerque’s KOAT, on May 18.
Salazar raced toward the sound of his young son, and saw a large animal of some sort bound from out of some bushes after his running child, pounce on the boy as if he were its natural prey, bite down on his scalp, and begin to drag the panicking child away.
The attacking animal was referred to in the KOAT piece as a “big cat,” in a May 24 Las Cruces Sun-News article as “a short, stocky, dark brown animal," and in a May 22 Albuquerque Journal brief as “ some type of cat.” Officials have also suspected the animal may have been a small bear, or perhaps a bobcat.
The area is a known home to a variety of suddenly suspect wildlife, including bears and bobcats, as well as black bears, coyotes, and feral dogs—and, of course, it is home to mountain lions. And yet, Cryptomundo.com, among the most popular websites about cryptozoology (the study of unknown animals), seems to think the attack may have been perpetrated by a creature currently unknown to science, partly because, according to KOAT, the father of the boy believes it a mountain lion, but dogs trained to sniff out mountain lions hadn’t yet turned up anything conclusive.
After its initial attack, the animal continued dragging the boy down the sloping ground, ripping away at the crying boy’s scalp as he did so, before pausing at a fallen tree too big to drag the wounded toddler over. The older Salazar ran at the animal, leapt high into the air above it, and came down with a crash, causing the as-yet-unidentified predator to lose its grip and bolt away into the woods.
Salazar snatched up his son, and experienced the horrifying realization that his little boy’s scalp had been severely torn, and his back, neck, and head had holes punched into them by the animal’s teeth. The family rushed their injured child down the Crest Road to the nearby Sandia Peak Ski Area, where a helicopter rushed the boy to UNM Hospital, in town, where he is still recovering. Game and Fish officials subsequently captured a bear in the area, but released it upon realizing it didn’t match the known traits of the suspected animal. Scat and prints found in the area indicated that the mystery animal was likely a young cougar, weighing between sixty to eighty pounds.
According to the May 22 Mountain View Telegraph, the most thorough account of the incident:
Three leg-hold snares have been set up in the area and, if an animal is caught, it will be sedated, its teeth measured and compared to the bite marks on Jose Jr.
Based on that evidence, the animal will either be released or euthanized, Morgan said.
Regardless, if the cat had had one second more, Jose Salazar Sr. said, it could have gotten a better grip, picked Jose up and been gone.
That thought “just makes me want to throw up,” he said Sunday [May 18].
For now, the animal’s fate, even its identity, remains uncertain.
So, unfortunately, does the status of little Jose Salazar, Jr—his parents have chosen not to release the details of his condition to the public.
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Reader Comments (2)
First that little boy and now that poor man in Pinos Altos:
http://www.lcsun-news.com/ci_9653798?source=most_emailed
Strange New Mexico is getting stranger.