Cat’s Change of Venue May Be Temporary

It appears that the case of the phantom feline of the Van Nuys Courthouse has been solved.

Temporarily, anyway.

The little gray cat--no one is sure if it’s male or female--showed up in the old Municipal Court clerk’s office about two months ago.

The cat stymied courthouse police officers, clerks, custodians and others who searched under chairs and couches, in boxes, beneath desks and behind cabinets in the locked and unused clerk’s office. The office was vacated when the new Van Nuys Municipal Court building opened in February, 1989. All the searchers found were cat droppings.

Last Wednesday, janitors claimed a victory of sorts, sneaking up on the mystery cat after distracting it with a plate of food. They grabbed it and put it out of the building. But no one knows whether he will simply return to the room in the same way he periodically vanished from it before.

Courthouse police say there had been a game of cat-and-mouse going on for weeks.

“He sits up on the counter and watches you,” said Sgt. Tom Tribble, an officer with the Los Angeles County Safety Police, who staffs a courthouse security post with a view into the room where the cat sightings occurred. “As soon as you turn the key in the lock, he takes off. He just bolts.”

“She has a hiding place in there somewhere. I don’t know where,” said Officer R. Goynes of the Safety Police.

“Just yesterday, me and the sergeant went in there and went looking for him,” said Safety Police Officer Andy Aguilar a few days before the janitors shooed the cat away. “We walked all over the place, but we couldn’t find anything. So we just locked the place back up and left.”

Kim Ellis, a clerk in the criminal division, also joined a recent search party seeking the cat. “I hope he’s OK,” Ellis said. “I know somebody who would take him if they found him.”

Some theorize that the cat is the mother of a stray kitten seen wandering around outside the courthouse in recent months.

Safety Police Officer Vickie Alexander said she figures that the cat is a renegade from a small group of cats and kittens living underneath the nearby Dependency Court. Some of the cats are gray like the phantom cat, she said.

Various officers and court personnel take turns feeding the members of that little cat colony, estimated by employees at a half a dozen.

Goynes said she and others have left milk, water, meat and other food for the phantom Municipal Court cat on occasion, too.

But Tribble still worries.

“He looks pretty thin, but with all the fur sticking out, it’s hard to tell,” he said.