A solo hiker who authorities believe was killed by a mountain lion on a remote Colorado trail on New Year's Day was not the first person to encounter one of the predators in the area in recent weeks.
Gary Messina said he was running along the same trail on a dark November morning when his headlamp caught the gleam of two eyes in the nearby brush. Messina used his phone to snap a quick photo before a mountain lion rushed him.
Messina said he threw the phone at the animal, kicked dirt and yelled as the lion kept trying to circle behind him. After a couple of harrowing minutes he broke a bat-sized stick off a downed log, hit the lion in the head with it and it ran off, he said.
The woman whose body was found Thursday on the same Crosier Mountain trail had “wounds consistent with a mountain lion attack,” said Kara Van Hoose with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. An autopsy is scheduled for next week, said Rafael Moreno with the Larimer County Coroner's Office.
Wildlife officials late Thursday tracked down and killed two mountain lions in the area — one at the scene and another nearby. A necropsy will help determine if either or both of those animals attacked the woman and whether they had neurological diseases such as rabies or avian flu.
A search for a third mountain lion reported in the area was ongoing Friday, Van Hoose said. Nearby trails remained closed while the hunt continued. Van Hoose said circumstances would dictate whether that lion is also killed.
Based on the aggressiveness of the animal that attacked him on Nov. 11, Messina suspects it could be the same one that killed the woman on New Year’s Day.
“I had to fight it off because it was basically trying to maul me,” Messina told The Associated Press. “I was scared for my life and I wasn’t able to escape. I tried backing up and it would try to lunge at me.”
The 32-year-old man from nearby Glen Haven, Colorado, reported his encounter to wildlife officials days later who posted signs to warn people about the animal along trails in the Crosier Mountain area northeast of Estes Park, Van Hoose said. The signs were later removed, she said.
Mountain lion sightings in that area east of Rocky Mountain National Park are common, Van Hoose said, because it offers good habitat for the animals: It’s remote with thick forests, rocky outcroppings and lots of elevation changes.
Yet attacks on humans by the animals are rare, and the last suspected fatal encounter in Colorado was in 1999, when a 3-year-old boy disappeared in the wilderness and his tattered clothes were found more than three years later. In 1997, a 10-year-old boy was killed by a lion and dragged away while hiking with family members in Rocky Mountain National Park.
Two hikers on Thursday saw the victim's body on the trail at around noon from about 100 yards (meters) away, Van Hoose said. A mountain lion was nearby and they threw rocks to scare it away. One of the hikers, a physician, attended to the victim but did not find a pulse, Van Hoose said.
The victim will be publicly identified following the autopsy by the coroner, who is also expected to provide a cause of death.
Mountain lions — also known as cougars, pumas or catamounts — can weigh 130 pounds (60 kilograms) and grow to more than 6 feet (1.8 meters) long. They primarily eat deer.
Colorado has an estimated 3,800 to 4,400 of the animals, which are classified as a big game species in the state and can be hunted.
Thursday's killing would be the fourth fatal mountain lion attack in North America over the past decade, and the 30th since 1868, according to information from the California-based Mountain Lion Foundation. Not all of those deaths have been confirmed as mountain lion attacks.
Most attacks occur during the day and when humans are active in lion territories, indicating the animals are not seeking out the victims, according to the advocacy group. About 15% of attacks are fatal.
“As more people live, work, and recreate in areas that overlap wildlife habitat, interactions can increase, not because mountain lions are becoming more aggressive, but because overlap is growing,” said Byron Weckworth, chief conservation officer for the foundation.
To reduce the risk travel in groups, keep children close and avoid dawn and dusk when lions are most active, Weckworth said. During an encounter, maintain eye contact with the lion, make yourself appear larger and back away slowly; don't run, he said.
Last year in Northern California, two brothers were stalked and attacked by a lion that they tried to fight off. One of the brothers was killed.
FILE - The General Store is seen Oct. 24, 2006, in Glen Haven, Colo. (AP Photo/The Denver Post, Karl Gehring, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Thursday that Pam Bondi is out as his attorney general, ending the contentious tenure of a loyalist who upended the Justice Department’s culture of independence from the White House, oversaw large-scale firings of career employees and moved aggressively to investigate the Republican president’s perceived enemies.
The announcement follows months of scrutiny over the Justice Department’s handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking investigation that made Bondi the target of angry conservatives even with her close relationship with Trump. She also struggled to satisfy Trump’s demands to prosecute his political rivals, with multiple investigations rejected by judges or grand juries or yet to produce charges.
Trump named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as the acting attorney general, though three people familiar with the matter have said he has privately discussed Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a permanent pick.
Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, came into office last year pledging that she would not play politics with the Justice Department, but she quickly started investigations of Trump foes, sparking an outcry that the law enforcement agency was being wielded as a tool of revenge to advance the president’s political and personal agenda.
She ushered in a period of intense turmoil at the department that included the firings of career prosecutors deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump and the resignations of hundreds of other employees. Her departure continues a trend of Justice Department upheaval that has defined Trump’s presidency as multiple attorneys general across his two terms have either been pushed out or resigned after proving unwilling or unable to meet his demands for the position.
Bondi rejected accusations that she politicized the Justice Department and said her mission was to restore the institution’s credibility after overreach by President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration with two federal criminal cases against Trump. Bondi’s defenders have said she worked to refocus the department to better tackle illegal immigration and violent crime and brought much-needed change to an agency they believe unfairly targeted conservatives.
Bondi’s public embrace of the president, however, marked a sharp departure from her predecessors, who generally took pains to maintain an arm’s-length distance from the White House to protect the impartiality of investigations and prosecutions. Bondi postured herself as Trump’s chief supporter and protector, praising and defending him in congressional hearings and placing a banner with his face on the exterior of Justice Department headquarters.
She called for an end to the “weaponization” of law enforcement she said occurred under the Biden administration, even though Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, the special counsel who produced two cases against Trump, have said they followed the facts, the evidence and the law in their decision-making. Bondi’s critics, meanwhile, said she was the one who had politicized the agency to do the president’s bidding.
“You’ve turned the People’s Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge,” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary committee, said at a February hearing.
Bondi delivered a combative performance but few substantive answers at that hearing as she angrily insulted her Democratic questioners with name-calling, praised Trump over the performance of the stock market — “The Dow is up over 50,000 right now” —- and openly aligned herself as in sync with a president whom she painted as a victim of past impeachments and investigations.
Even Republicans began to challenge her, with the Republican-led House Oversight Committee last month issuing a subpoena to her to appear for a closed-door interview about the Epstein files.
Under Bondi’s leadership, the department opened investigations into a string of Trump foes, including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan. The high-profile prosecutions of Comey and James were short-lived as they were quickly thrown out by a judge who ruled that the prosecutor who brought the cases was illegally appointed.
Trump repeatedly publicly praised and defended Bondi but also showed flashes of impatience with his attorney general’s efforts to meet his demands to prosecute his rivals. In one extraordinary social media post last year, Trump called on Bondi to move quickly to prosecute his foes, including James and Comey, telling her: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
Bondi oversaw the exodus of thousands of career employees — both through firings and voluntary departures — including lawyers who prosecuted violent attacks on police at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; environmental, civil rights and ethics enforcers; counterterrorism prosecutors; and others.
She struggled to overcome early stumbles over the Epstein files that angered conservatives eager for government bombshells about the case, which has long fascinated conspiracy theorists. She herself had fed the conspiracy theory machine with a suggestion in a 2025 Fox News Channel interview that Epstein’s “client list” was sitting on her desk for review. The department later acknowledged that no such document exists.
Bondi was ridiculed over a move to hand out binders of Epstein files to conservative influencers at the White House only for it to be later revealed that the documents included no new revelations. And despite promises that more files were going to become public, the Justice Department in July said no more would be released, prompting Congress to pass a bill to force the agency to do so.
The Epstein files fumbles led to a stunning public criticism from White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, a close friend of Bondi’s, who told Vanity Fair that the attorney general “completely whiffed.” The Justice Department’s release of millions of pages of Epstein files did little to tamp down criticism, prompting a House committee with the support of five Republicans to subpoena Bondi to answer questions under oath.
Bondi, who defended Trump during his first impeachment trial, was his second choice to lead the Justice Department, picked for the role after former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida withdrew his name from consideration amid scrutiny over sex trafficking allegations.
President Donald Trump speaks with Attorney General Pam Bondi during a roundtable discussion on public safety at a Tennessee Air National Guard Base, Monday, March 23, 2026, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Attorney General Pam Bondi arrives before President Donald Trump speaks about the Iran war from the Cross Hall of the White House on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)
President Donald Trump participates in a roundtable discussion on public safety at a Tennessee Air National Guard Base, Monday, March 23, 2026, in Memphis, Tenn., with Attorney General Pam Bondi, right. (AP Photo/Bruce Newman)
Attorney General Pam Bondi listens during a Cabinet meeting at the White House, Thursday, March 26, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump walks from the Blue Room to speak about the Iran war from the Cross Hall of the White House on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)
