Stories: Ward C, 10:12 p.m.

• Dr. Evan Wood
• Linda Taylor, R.N.
• Dec. 18, 1996
  • Era: Dragon In The Streets
• Unidentified hospital on the U.S. east coast
• The First Sighting
• The news program that Evan and Linda watch shows the footage of The First Sighting that became instantly famous.
• So, what ever did happen to Mr. DeLee? Well, after Linda finally called 911, the call went out to the local police, who bounced it to the county sheriff's due to a shortage of manpower. The deputies arrived, took one look into the room, and went back to dispatch to try to get Animal Control out of bed. Meanwhile, local reporters arrived, sensing a story after listening to all the chatter on the police scanner. While authorities bickered over whose responsibility it was, the reporter volunteered to call a local veterinarian, who arrived on the scene and finally talked his way close enough to the non-breathing tiger to declare him dead. A large argument broke out about whether the animal was DeLee or not; the consensus was yes, though sheriff's deputies refused to reach any definitive conclusions, and jerry-rigged some pawprints onto scratch paper for later comparison against DeLee's fingerprints.
  
  Eventually, Animal Control arrived, along with several big-cats workers from the local zoo that Evan and the reporter managed to track down; in front of a crowd of dozens, the tiger was manhandled onto a stretcher and taken down to the morgue (as the consensus was that the tiger was the former Mr. DeLee and should be treated as human for burial purposes). There, it was quickly discovered that the animal simply wouldn't fit anywhere convenient. Space was cleared out in one of the walk-in medical refrigerators, where the body sat for several days as the county fumbled through the uncertain legal waters of animal-corpses-that-were-probably-once-human. The tiger was unceremoniously buried by the county in late January amid awkward apologies to DeLee's widow, who decided to hold a memorial service after her funeral plans were refused.
  
  Mrs. DeLee insisted that speakers avoid any mention of her husband's manner of death or his lifelong love of tigers, disappointing the several hundred gawkers who flooded into the church from around the county.