‘EVERYTHING HURTS’
Bloodied cougar attack victim begs for help in harrowing 911 call after his pal was dragged away to his death
In the panicked phone calls, Isaac Sederbaum says: 'I got attacked by a mountain lion, my friend did too'
RECORDINGS of the harrowing phone calls made by a bloodied cougar attack victim begging for help after his friend was fatally attacked have been released by police.
Isaac Sederbaum made the emergency calls after friend SJ Brooks was attacked by the hungry big cat in the Cascade Mountain in Seattle, Washington State, on Saturday May 19.
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The pair were mountain biking on logging roads when they saw the cougar following them.
Authorities said they responded appropriately by attempting to scare off the cougar and even smacking it with a bike, prompting the big cat to leave.
But as they stood to catch their breath, the cat returned - biting Sederbaum, 31, on the head and shaking him violently before turning its attention to Brooks who tried to run away.
Badly bloodied, Sederbaum got on his bike and rode to where he could get a cellphone signal to call 911 -and in recordings released by the King County Sheriff's Office, Sederbaum desperately tries to get help to his friend.
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Although the first of several calls failed, Sederbaum manages to say: "Can you hear me?" and "Help!"
The King County Sheriff's Office dispatcher calls him back and asks: "Hi, this is 911. We got a hang-up call. Everything OK?"
"No," he replies in a panicked tone. "I got attacked by a mountain lion, my friend did too. I don't know where I am. I'm trying to come right down the mountain."
"What mountain are you on?" she asks.
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"I don't know," he says. "I was on the logging roads."
"Listen to me," she says. "Listen, listen. I need you to hang up and call 911 so we can get location on you."
When he calls back, Isaac tells them he sees a car, then flags it down. "Can you talk to 911?" he asks a woman in the car. "I got attacked by a mountain lion. My friend is up there."
As the woman looks at a map and tries to tell the dispatcher how to reach them, Sederbaum wails in the background. "You're not going to die," the dispatcher tells him.
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Sederbaum's voice breaks as he tells another dispatcher: "I'm so worried about my friend... Everything hurts," he says.
"I know," she tells him. "But you're doing a really great job staying calm there."
Another vehicle arrives a truck with a man who identifies himself as Matt and he gives more detail about the location and Sederbaum's condition, saying: "He's really scared, he wants to get out of the mountains," he says. "He does have some bad lacerations, particularly on his right ear."
The first deputy arrived at 11:19 a.m., a little more than half an hour after the first call, and it took emergency services an additional hour before they found Brooks' bike and body.
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The cougar was standing over Brooks in the woods, but fled when an officer fired a shot. Hours later, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife agents used dogs to track the cougar to a nearby tree and killed it.
The animal was determined to be underweight, and a necropsy is expected to determine whether it was ill.
Sederbaum was released from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle on Tuesday.
The attack on Brooks was the first fatal mountain lion attack in Washington state in 94 years.
What is a cougar?
- Cougars, also known as mountain lions and pumas, are a large cat species native to the Americas.
- The big cat, which is solitary in nature, is predominately found in the west coast of Canada and the United States.
- Household pets such as dogs and cats have been found in the stomachs of dead cougars in California and Washington.
- Fatal cougar attacks are extremely rare in North America with around two dozen being recorded in the last 100 years.
- Cougars are the fourth largest cat species in the world, with adult males weighing up to 100kgs.
- Their method of attack is usually ambush, but they tend to only attack humans when cornered
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Brooks was a cycling enthusiast who co-founded Friends on Bikes Seattle to create an online community where women/trans/femme/non-binary people of colour could have fun on bikes, according to Seattle Bike Blog.
In October 2017, Brooks said: “Certain cultures and certain genders aren't associated with bicycling even though all those people do bicycle.”
According to their LinkedIn, Brooks was the director of operations at Hillman City Collaboratory in Seattle and was a research assistant at William James College in Boston, Massachusetts.
While in Boston, Brooks was a manager at Boston Centre for the Arts and also worked as a bicycle mechanic, reports the Seattle Times.
The academic received a doctorate in philosophy at Boston University in 2016.
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