Cops Shoot Runaway Bull on NY Street

Sunday, June 20, 1999

By The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- A bull escaped from an illegal rodeo and rampaged through city streets, at times charging at people, before police officers shot it dead on Sunday. 

Detective Robert Samuel, a police spokesman, said the bull was one of nine owned by a North Carolina-based rodeo company that hired a vacant lot in the New York borough of Queens for a show, but was ordered to shut down for lacking a permit. 

As police watched rodeo workers loading the animals on a truck, one of them bolted. 

``I guess he didn't want to go,'' Samuel said. 

The animal rumbled several blocks through the neighborhood, pursued by cops and a rodeo worker with a lariat, who tried in vain to lasso it. 

Finally, officers tried to herd the bull into a parking lot, but it refused to cooperate and was shot dead after the police deemed it a menace to the public.

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