A crazed groundhog set its sights on a fallen jogger in New Jersey, only to be thwarted by a quick-thinking teen.
The hogwild drama unfolded on the morning of July 19 when Cait Lostan was confronted by the hostile hog on a trail behind the Bernards Township Police Department.
“I was running in the woods on the path behind the police station and high school this morning when I came upon a groundhog that looked injured,” the 36-year-old posted to the BaskingRidgeMoms Facebook group.
“It must have been startled when I made a call on speakerphone because it charged at me screaming and lunging.
“I ended up on my back kicking at it and screaming for about a minute,” she continued.
The stunned jogger flung her cell phone at the crazy critter, who then started gnawing at it.
Ridge High School student Caleb Morris had just finished a cross country run when he heard screaming.
He made his way up the path “and right in front of my eyes lay a woman on the ground, shouting and screaming, and looked as if she was trying to fight something off,” the ninth-grader told The Post.
“I never thought that a groundhog could be as aggressive as this one,” Morris said, theorizing the animal was rabid.
“I was sort of frozen. I was stunned by the fact that I was watching viral YouTube video-worthy content in real time.”
But Morris took a pass on Internet fame.
He said the woman in distress was still on her back, “kicking at the groundhog and screaming as loud as she could at the same time.”
Shockingly, he said, “groundhogs can scream even louder . . .the groundhogs’ screams were even more unsettling!”
The jogger got back onto her feet and Morris realized she couldn’t call the cops since the gopher had eaten her phone.
“With the power of ‘Hey Siri, Call the police!,’ I was immediately put on the phone with a [911] operator,” Morris recalled.
The cops arrived a short time later and found the groundhog still “snacking on the woman’s phone.”
The cops thanked Morris and instructed him to get going while they “finished things up,” Lostan posted.
Bernards Township Mayor Jennifer Asay honored the teen on Sept. 10 with a proclamation.
