Long before there was Harambe, the doomed gorilla at Cincinnati’s zoo, there was Susie, Atlanta’s rampaging chimp.
Susie, a chimp known to make the rounds at bars with her owner on Cheshire Bridge Road, got loose one morning in 1982 and set out on a frenzied run of terror during which she bit five people, tried to board a MARTA bus, slammed a woman to the pavement, and threw a tow driver over the hood of a car.
Her escape was ended when a 22-year-old Atlanta cop named Richard Hyde fired four slugs into the animated primate.
The episode was one of the odd occurrences that seem to buzz around Mr. Hyde, now an investigator for a law firm who has in recent years been involved in probes of cheating at Atlanta schools, alleged corruption in DeKalb County, and numerous judges who have been ousted from office.
Last year, I wrote about Hyde when former mayor Andy Young brought up his name during the Atlanta schools' trial. Young made reference to the "The Bond Affair," a prolonged community soap opera that started in 1987 when the estranged wife of civil rights leader Julian Bond walked into a police station and accused her husband and other prominent Atlantans of doing cocaine. That set off investigations that were as frenzied as Susie the Chimp's mad dash. And Hyde, naturally, was the narcotics officer at the center of it all.
“I’m a shinola magnet; trouble followed me,” Hyde said the other day, although he didn’t say shinola.
But back to Susie.
On the morning of June 24, 1982, Hyde got a call that Susie was, well, going ape out on Piedmont Road.
The story goes that Susie’s owner, Dr. David Putnam, who ran the Siam Zoo Pet Center on Cheshire Bridge Road, came in early to clean up his exotic pet store. Susie liked to help him mop.
According to The Atlanta Constitution from back then, Susie went into a storage room when the door closed behind her, locking her inside. The chimp pushed against a plexiglass window pane and got outside the pet center parking lot. The owner said a passing police squad saw her and their lights frightened her.
“As she got more and more frightened, she lost her rationality. She inflicted some superficial bite injuries to four or five people,” Putnam told the paper at the time. “At one point she was no longer on the streets, she was headed into a wooded area. They shot her; they kept shooting. … I don’t believe five shots in the back was an appropriate response.”
All these years later, Hyde waves off the back story of Susie as innocent victim. And of the shots being in the back, for that matter.
“It was a lot more gruesome than the paper had it,” he recalled. “She was running up and down Cheshire Bridge and Piedmont biting people. Anyone she could catch, she bit.”
She started with a janitor for a nightclub, who was bit in the thigh, gashing his femoral artery, Hyde said.
“It was surreal,” Hyde remembers about the scene, with cops futilely driving in cars and running about trying to head off the chimp. “They don’t teach you at the police academy to corral a rampaging chimp.”
He turned around and saw a Dunkin Donuts filled with faces pressed against the window. Many of them had sought refuge there.
The mayhem lasted about an hour.
“I was the junior guy on the scene and was expecting the senior guys to do the right thing,” said Hyde. Besides, he was reticent about pulling his gun — he was under scrutiny for having shot a drug dealer a week earlier as the two struggled for his gun.
Finally, he acted as the 145-pound chimp went after the tow truck driver, tossing him like a ragdoll and biting into his forearm while also choking him.
Hyde stepped forward and shot the chimp four times in the chest.
“After I shot her, she looked at me with those fiery eyes, shaking her head back and forth before running off,” he recalled, sounding as if he were providing fodder for a potboiler.
The chimp flew up a tree and then fell to the ground, dead.
Police put Susie in a trash truck and delivered the carcass to the city dump. Hyde was assigned to the Reports and Revenue section to keep him out of trouble for a while. And David Putnam, the owner, later had his exotic pet store closed down three years later after health officials found several violations.
He pleaded guilty to violating county health codes and state wildlife regulations, was sentenced to six months in jail and was banished from Georgia.
A strip club now stands where the business once operated, Hyde said.
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