Residents of Heidelberg, Mississippi, have spent the past week on edge after an unlikely and unsettling event — a truck carrying rhesus monkeys overturned on Interstate 59, scattering more than twenty animals across nearby woods and neighborhoods. For most locals, the news was strange enough to seem unreal. But for one mother, it turned from headline to nightmare in her own backyard.
Early Sunday morning, 35-year-old Jessica Bond Ferguson was making breakfast for her five children when her sixteen-year-old son burst through the front door, pale and shaking. “He said something was moving by the fence,” Ferguson recalled. “At first I thought maybe a raccoon or a stray dog. Then I looked out the window — and it wasn’t a dog.”