Family Comes Home, Finds a Mountain Lion

A mountain lion that became trapped inside a Colorado home killed a house cat before police and wildlife officers were able to scare it out, the AP reports. Boulder police say the homeowner came back to the house late Thursday night and found the mountain lion inside. It appeared that it had pushed through a screen and couldn't get back out. The big cat roamed throughout two levels of the home for more than an hour before officers used non-lethal rounds to scare it out the front door and away from the neighborhood, which is just southwest of downtown Boulder.

Boulder woman Kayla Slaughter describes the experience of seeing the mountain lion face her cat, Klondike: "There was a mountain lion standing in our living room, it looked right at him and licked its lips and he took off," she tells CBS Denver. Now she's mourning the loss: "I got her my junior year of college," Slaughter says of the cat. "She's been with me for 10 years." Police, who photographed the mountain lion lying down between a coffee table and a couch, called the break-in worrisome and asked residents to keep ground-level doors and windows locked at night.

(More mountain lion stories.)