It was mid-afternoon last Sunday when Tom Thickstun got a text from his neighbor telling him there was a bull in his yard.
Sure enough, when Thickstun checked his cameras covering the front of his house east of Bloomington, he saw the massive black Angus lumbering through his lawn.
The bull showed up on Heritage Woods Road around 2 p.m., according to neighbors, and spent the next eight hours making circles around the road and the surrounding residential areas.
“I don't know what the circumstances were,” Thickstun said. “I wasn't here. I wish I had been. I don't know that it would have turned out differently. But I mean, with it back here, around my trees, I could have run ropes around the trees about five times and called the guy.”
After the first sighting, an email chain was started for Heritage Woods Road residents to communicate about the escapee's whereabouts. The subject was: Missing a Bull?
Photos and videos of the bull in various locations circulated from neighbor to neighbor.
Multiple residents said they tried to lure the bull into their gated backyards to keep him contained and safe until the owner could arrive, but they said the bull seemed very focused on his walk.
Last Sunday had a high of 86 degrees, and the bull was drooling heavily. Some residents said they thought he looked thirsty.
Monroe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jeff Brown wrote in an email that they first received a call around 2:45 p.m. for a traffic hazard in the 5100 block of East State Road 46. The bull was walking on the roadway.
When deputies arrived on the scene, Brown wrote they could not locate the bull because it was constantly moving through densely wooded areas, also citing heavy traffic on the highway.
A black Angus bull is pictured walking through a backyard near Heritage Woods Road on March 22, 2026, in Bloomington. The escaped bull was returned to its owner the next day.
In the email, Brown said Monroe County Central Dispatch attempted to locate the animal's owner but were unsuccessful.
At 5:39 p.m., the sheriff’s office received a call reporting the bull had been seen in the neighborhoods of Falls Creek and Gentry Park, both a street over from Heritage Woods Road. Brown said the dispatch noted at this time that they had received over 10 calls regarding the loose bull.
After Thickstun got home, he encountered sheriff’s office deputies on his road, Heritage Woods, looking for the bull. When Thickstun spoke with a deputy, he said they informed him that the bull came from “way far out east.”
Thickstun doesn’t own any livestock, but he has worked around them in the past.
“Young bulls like that go crazy and get out,” Thickstun said. “You know, they're like teenage boys. They go nuts and kick the fence down. Who knows how long he wandered.”
Brown wrote that deputies finally located the bull around Moore’s Pike and SR 446, though the animal continued roaming all the way to Smith Road and Moore’s Pike. Brown wrote that the sheriffs used roaming patrols, foot movement, rolling roadblocks, drones, emergency lights and sirens to keep the bull “contained and out of the roadway.”
According to Brown, the owner was finally located at 8:49 p.m. The bull was determined to have gotten loose from a rural property on Kerr Creek Road, about 1.5 miles from Heritage Woods Road.
Heritage Woods Road residents reported seeing three sheriffs get out of their cars carrying their shotguns around 9 p.m. Sunday. The sheriffs walked into a nearby field, where an infrared drone was flying above to locate the bull in the dark.
Thickstun saw the deputies running around in the field behind his house, a search party for the lost bull. One resident, Karen, said she saw the bull’s eyes glowing in the dark before she heard a gunshot.
Brown did not respond to an additional request for clarification on whether deputies shot the bull by time of publication.
According to Brown’s email, the bull fled back into the woods, and deputies halted efforts for everyone’s safety due to the incoming thunderstorm.
When the sheriffs came back from the field, residents said the deputies told them they still didn’t have the bull down and would be back in the morning.
At 5:36 p.m. the next day, the sheriff's office received another call stating the bull was around SR 46 and Lori Lane, Brown wrote. The owner was contacted and retrieved his bull.
