Celebrity squatter finally leaves

Biologists aren’t sure exactly when the cougar known as P-22 slipped away from under Jason and Paula Archinaco’s sleek, multi-level white contemporary in Los Feliz on Tuesday.

About 1 a.m., officials cleared the area and left P-22, who had startled the workers who came upon him in a crawl space, to find his way out. When officials returned a few hours later they could not locate the 6-year-old, 130-pound mountain lion.

About 11:30 a.m., Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service’s Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, reported that he had used telemetry gear to pick up a ping from P-22’s tracking collar in a remote canyon in Griffith Park, about 11/2 miles inside the park’s boundaries.

For three years, the animal has ranged the park. Surveillance camera video and data from P-22’s GPS tracking collar show that the Los Feliz neighborhood has also been a regular hangout. Lt. Marty Wall of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife speculated that P-22 might have been regularly using the crawl space of the house, which has frequently been vacant...