2 Apes Monkey Around During Sylmar Caper

When police received a call Thursday from a woman in Sylmar who said a gorilla was outside a shopping center, peering in and banging on the windows, they wondered if it was just another crank call.

“I was hysterical when I called, I was in tears and they thought I was joking, but I was really scared,” said the woman, photographer Stephanie Squires.

A few minutes later, a police dispatcher called back to ask if her report was true.

“I don’t blame them,” Squires said, “because how do people know gorillas out in Sylmar?”

And, it turned out, they didn’t.

When three police cars answered the call about 4:30 p.m., they found that a simian creature, indeed, had loped across Foothill Boulevard to the shopping center, climbed an olive tree and threw olive pits at passing cars.

But it was no gorilla.

The ape was one of two chimpanzees, a male and a female, that were frolicking for about 30 minutes around Foothill Boulevard. They had slipped out of cages inadvertently left open at a walled compound on Yarnell Street. The facility houses a half dozen chimps, a zebra, an ocelot and several other exotic animals, all used in movies, Sgt. Ken Dionne said.

The female chimp scampered out first, followed by a larger male chimp. While the female played in the tall grass behind the shopping center at Foothill Boulevard and Yarnell Street, the male leaped atop an empty school bus and began yelling, Squires said.

“He got on top of a deserted school bus and began curling his lips and baring his teeth,” she said. “You could see his teeth from across the street.”

“When he started yelling, the little one came hobbling across the street, stopping traffic.”

Customers and employees at Barbara’s Hair Company got the best view of the 5-foot, 200-pound male chimp when he began to pound on their windows, hairdresser Nancy Martin said.

“He was banging on the window and we felt like we were in the zoo and he was looking at us in the cage,” Martin said “ He was making faces at us .”

The wayward chimps were finally rounded up by Martine Collette, an animal trainer and director of Wildlife Waystation.

Collette sedated the chimps and put them back in their cages, Dionne said.