He’s got a good eye for news.
A news station in Cincinnati suspected they had a stowaway living inside their office, but were stunned to find the culprit was a wily raccoon seeking an “escape” from the frigid temps.
The team at Local 12, a CBS-affiliate based in Cincinnati, had a new coworker move in right under their very noses — a quiet, pint-sized raccoon.
They weren’t aware of the pest’s identity “for a while,” chief meteorologist John Gumm admitted in a post on X, but they weren’t entirely surprised when one of the newsroom’s engineers encountered the furry bandit during a late-night shift.
“We suspected someone had broken into Local12 and had been secretly living inside the station to escape the brutally cold winter weather. Now we have an ID on the perpetrator,” Gumm captioned his post, with an attached video of the raccoon.
“The authorities have been alerted,” Gumm added.
In the video, taken by Local 12 Engineer Noah Schuler, the trash panda was making good on its nickname as it tried to covertly sift through a garbage can in the newsroom.
The bandit paused every few seconds, before ducking its head back into the can.
It stretched out one paw in an attempt to grab something at bottom, but nearly tipped the can over, sending it scrambling back to its presumed hideaway on the outskirts of the newsroom, according to the video.
It’s unclear if or when the raccoon was removed from the building.
The Local 12 team, and their dedicated audience, had a field day with the long-awaited identification of their mystery squatter.
“[Local 12] has a new employee helping us put the show on the air,” news anchor Meghan Mongillo joked on Facebook.
“This is actually the new hire. I’m their lawyer and firing them would be wrongful termination,” one user teased on X.
“Get him an employee badge, a cute bib and a bowl of cherries to much on stat,” another added.
The Local 12 squatter isn’t the only of its kind to shoot up to stardom this year.
In December, one raccoon went viral after it broke into a liquor store in Virginia and drank itself into a stupor. It was found sprawled face-down beside a toilet in the employee restroom — and left a clear trail of broken liquor bottles leading right to it.
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