A man wearing a full animal costume and surgical mask walks out of a TV station in Baltimore, Thursday, April 28, 2016. (Kenneth K. Lam/The Baltimore Sun via AP)
On Thursday afternoon, a man in a quirky animal suit approached a local TV station in Baltimore. Besides a onesie, he was also said to be wearing a surgical mask and a slew of wires, as the Washington Post reports. In one hand was a flash drive, which the man apparently told the outlet's news director—who happened to be passing through the lobby—contained information on a massive government conspiracy involving outer space.
The man didn't get past the lobby before the police were called. Now those officers suspect the same man is responsible for a car catching fire in the station's parking lot while he was on the premises. A few minutes after 3 PM, the mysterious animal figure was taken down by a sniper, according to the Baltimore Sun, suffering what appeared at the time of publication to be non-fatal gunshot wound.
It's at least the second police shooting in what has been a very weird week for the city.
A police spokesman said cops opened fire on the man after he left the building and started approaching officers, who asked him to take his hands out of his pockets. (He allegedly refused.) First aid could not immediately be rendered because it was suspected the man might be wearing an explosive device. Indeed, as Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis was delivering a press conference, the man was still on the ground, being prodded by a bomb-squad robot.
The bizarre spectacle makes for a grim bookend to a week that, in Baltimore at least, has been dominated by the nonfatal police shooting of a 13-year-old boy carrying a fake gun. But just as that tragedy was preceded by the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot two years ago while playing with a toy gun on a Cleveland playground, media outlets have been the sites of strange violence in the past. There was R. Budd Dwyer, the state treasurer from Pennsylvania who famously shot himself during a 1987 press conference, Arthur Teele, a former city commissioner who shot himself in the Miami Herald lobby in 2005, and more recently, Vester Lee Flanagan, who shot two TV journalists in Virginia during a live broadcast last year.
This isn't even the first time in recent memory that someone's attacked a TV station in Baltimore: In 2014, a man rammed a stolen truck into an ABC outpost there.
Just after 4 PM Thursday, first responders secured the wounded hedgehog man, who was struck three times, inside an ambulance, and he was sped to a local hospital. He was expected to survive.
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