A Fayetteville woman who was attacked by a rabid fox last week said she was very thankful for the later intervention by police and the county’s animal control department. Two elementary schools are near the attack site.

Exa Brown said she was standing on the porch of her Pye Court home in northwest Fayetteville, tending to a pot of day-lilies, when she felt a bite on the back of her left thigh. She faced the animal who then kept on attacking, biting one of her ankles and making more advances as she started screaming.

Brown said the fox was “jumping” at her, and with a rod in one of her legs from a 2005 car accident, she knew she couldn’t get away quickly. She also knew better than to try and fight the animal.

So she chose to scream instead.

Brown said her screams must have rattled the fox, who all of a sudden stopped the attack and ran away.

“I couldn’t believe that he left. He was coming at me pretty good,” Brown said.

Ultimately police shot and killed the fox, whose remains were sent to a lab at the University of Georgia. The lab confirmed the presence of rabies, Brown said.

Before the fox was killed, it attacked another man going to his mailbox and a shop vac that was put on the ground by a woman who’d just come from the store, Brown said.

The search for the fox drew both uniformed police officers as well as detectives in suits, Brown said.

Brown said she was extremely impressed with the “efficiency” of the police and animal control officers.

Brown described the animal as being small, but larger than a chihuahua dog, “maybe 15 inches high and a couple of feet long.”

Because one of the bites broke her skin, Brown has to have a series of rabies shots over the next several days. Treated at the Piedmont Fayette Hospital emergency room, Brown said she was the first fox bite victim the staff there had seen.

Later, Brown found out that the fox’s den was about 20-30 feet away from her backyard, and the barks she previously heard and attributed to a neighbor’s new dog were likely the fox’s pups.

Brown said a number of children and some adults had taken to cutting through her backyard as a shortcut to and from nearby elementary schools — Fayetteville Primary and Hood Avenue — and also to go to work in downtown Fayetteville. She was thankful none of them had been hurt by the fox.

“Thank God it was me and not them,” Brown said.

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