GURNEE (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Authorities in Gurnee are attempting to determine whether a woman really captured, what she thinks she captured with a surveillance camera.
The motion detector camera caught what looks like a cougar in Marilynn Sullivan's fenced backyard in Gurnee, not too far from the Des Plaines River - which could be followed by an animal, like a big cat, with the cover of woods.
“I looked at it and saw what I thought was a large cougar,” Sullivan said. “I looked at the picture and freaked out. I’ve seen coyotes, but they have long noses and this has a big cat face."
The image does appear to show a cougar. She showed CBS 2 large tracks in the mud and what appears to be blood on her fence.
She said her two small dogs have been reacting.
“They just go crazy, barking,” Sullivan said. “Not like somebody's at the front door barking, but angry, scared.”
According to CBS 2, a trapper consulting with the state and now working with Sullivan is installing better surveillance cameras, because there is the possibility that the frightening image was also an optical illusion and may have been a neighborhood cat perched on a nearby chair.
Sullivan doubts that’s the case.
“I have never seen a house cat that big ,but I don’t know. My only thing was make sure the neighbors safe,” she said.
Sullivan does not want to see the animal killed, but she wants people to be safe.
It was 12 years ago, in 2008, when another courgar, determined to have come from South Dakota from DNA, was shot and killed in Chicago's Roscoe Village neighborhood by police.