Surveillance video from a Pasadena home has captured a frightening encounter between a large coyote and a 3-year-old boy.
On Monday afternoon, little Salvo Bessemer was walking toward the family car when he suddenly stopped, turned around and sprinted back through the front gate.
“He walked out to go to the car and came back running and screaming ‘Mama! Mama!’ and when I looked at him there was a massive coyote right behind him,” his mother, Aida Svelto, told The Times in an interview Tuesday.
Svelto wasn’t sure if the coyote was approaching her son until her partner Leonard Bessemer sent her the doorbell video and she watched the coyote follow Sal through their front gate from the street.
“I grabbed Sal and screamed,” she said. “The coyote turned around and left.”
Svelto is accustomed to seeing coyotes roaming around her neighborhood in Pasadena but they’re usually a lot smaller and mangy.
“There were a lot of coyotes around our old house in Echo Park,” she said.
The incident comes during coyote mating season, which typically runs from January through March and peaks in February, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Agricultural Commissioner. During this time, the animals are constantly moving around in search of mates and food sources. They are active at all hours and can be bolder than usual.
Coyotes are a familiar presence in the foothills around Pasadena, Altadena and Burbank, where residents have grown accustomed to spotting the animals in streets and on doorstep cameras. After the Eaton fire displaced wild animals from their natural habitat, the sightings grew. A doorbell camera in Altadena captured a coyote and a bear together, searching through the fire-scarred streets for food and water.
Suburban sprawl has brought humans and coyotes into increasingly close contact in recent decades as the Los Angeles area has some of the highest coyote population densities in the nation, according to University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Coyotes are generally shy and wary of people, although they are opportunistic when it comes to food and have become conditioned to relying on trash in areas bordering their natural habitats — but attacks can still happen. Last summer, a 6-year-old boy was attacked by a coyote while watching his sister’s softball game at Del Amo Park in Carson. The animal bit his head, neck and leg before his mother ran over and scared it off.
“I found that standing your ground and telling them to leave is what they need to go away,” Svelto said. “Having a whistle on my keys could be useful especially during mating season.”
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