The Bay Area’s long, furry nightmare is finally over.

A coyote that bit five people, including two young children, in the last eight months was caught and killed on Thursday in Moraga, a suburb of about 16,000 east of San Francisco, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced on Friday.

“It’s such a relief for the community,” Capt. Patrick Foy of the Department of Fish and Wildlife said in an interview on Friday. “They can finally enjoy the outdoors again.”

The animal, an adult male, had menaced a two-mile area in Moraga and neighboring Lafayette since last July, but Captain Foy said a team of United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services personnel finally caught it Thursday morning. It then took a day for a forensics lab to compare DNA collected from the coyote with those taken from each of the five victims.

The tests proved the coyote was the same one that had attacked a 2-year-old boy in July and a man working out at a high school athletic field in December. Three other incidents were reported after that, the last on February 19.

The coyote has now been euthanized.

Foy said the animals are nocturnal and normally fearful of humans and usually try to stay out of sight. He is unsure why this one was so aggressive.

“This was a really unusual case,” he said. “I’ve been around 24 years and never seen anything like it.”

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