Remote Surveillance Trailer in Glendale, CA

A Glendale woman is devastated after her beloved Shih Tzu was snatched by a mountain lion right in front of her late Monday night.

Laura McVay told KTLA she was walking her 12‑pound dog, Declan, near Matilija and Cleveland roads around 11:30 p.m. when the big cat lunged just steps from the front door of her mother’s home. Declan was on a leash at the time.

“I felt this strong presence and then a whoosh behind me to my right,” McVay said. “At the time, I had no idea what it was, and then he pounced on top of Declan.”

She said she tried to pull her dog away and screamed to scare the animal off, but nothing worked.

“He was so overpowering and strong. There was no way I was getting my dog back,” she said.

The mountain lion first ran into the street with Declan, then bolted up a nearby hillside. McVay estimates the entire encounter lasted less than a minute.

“It felt like I was dreaming because I couldn’t believe this was happening,” she said. “It was very surreal, terrifying and traumatizing.”

McVay has been staying with her elderly, ill mother at her childhood home. She recalls seeing coyotes in the neighborhood and hearing about the occasional coyote attack on pets, but never cougars. What unsettles her most is how the big cat seemed unfazed by her presence.

“That’s the part that’s so jarring. He was so brazen to attack when I was standing right there,” she said. “It wasn’t like Declan was off-leash and wandering. He was definitely stalking us during the walk.”

McVay said she contacted the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and submitted an online report.

Recent estimates place California’s mountain lion population between 3,200 and 4,500 animals. While not listed as endangered, experts say their numbers are threatened by a shrinking habitat and inbreeding.

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Bridge, now under construction in Agoura Hills, aims to provide cougars and other wildlife safe passage over the busy 101 Freeway, where many end up as roadkill.

If you encounter a mountain lion, the National Park Service recommends staying calm and not running. Stand upright and hold your ground or back away slowly. If you’re with a small child or pet, pick them up without bending over because crouching can make you appear like prey.

After calling Glendale home for 50 years, Public Storage is joining a parade of companies leaving Los Angeles for Texas.

The largest self-storage company worldwide – and the second largest public company in Los Angeles County, with a market cap exceeding $53 billion – announced last month that it will now be based in Frisco, Texas – a suburb of Dallas. The move was a natural progression,

H. Thomas Boyle, Public Storage’s chief financial and investment officer, said during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call in February.

When Public Storage would hire for corporate roles in Glendale or its other corporate office in Dallas, most of the new recruits ended up working out of the Dallas office. Eventually, the company’s corporate occupancy in Dallas grew to be larger than its Glendale office.

“We did see the office increase in size there to the point where today our office in Dallas is our largest corporate presence,” Boyle, who will take over as chief executive in April, said. “It makes sense to relocate the corporate headquarters.”

Public Storage did not respond to a request for comment.

The headquarters change is part of a fairly significant package of changes for Public Storage, with longtime Chief Executive Joe Russell retiring on March 31 and being retained for the next year as a consultant to assist with Boyle’s transition.

“It has been an honor to lead Public Storage through a decade of transformation, accretive growth and shareholder returns,” Russell said in a statement. “Tom has been a valued partner and an exceptional leader in his dual role as CFO and CIO, helping create the foundation that has driven our improved capital allocation, superior operations, and relative shareholder returns in recent years.”

Stream of exits

Public Storage’s exodus adds to the list of major companies that have left L.A. in recent years.

Toyota Motor North America moved its financial services headquarters from Torrance to Plano, Texas, in 2017 to connect its disparate headquarters in California, Kentucky and New York on one campus.

In 2020, real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. moved from downtown Los Angeles to Dallas in a move the company called “largely window dressing, since not many jobs are expected to transfer from Los Angeles to Texas, and Dallas has served as a key corporate office for several years.”

And Space Exploration Technologies Corp. moved from Hawthorne to Starbase, Texas, in 2024 after founder Elon Musk expressed disappointment with transgender rights legislation here.

Not all doom and gloom

Less than 2% of California’s headquarters left the state between 2011 and 2021, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Comparatively, the state saw 17% of its headquarters launch in the same period. While several tech companies have left California for states with lower taxes and fewer regulations, the nonprofit said that effect on the Golden State’s jobs economy appears to be negligible.

“Companies that move headquarters to other states do not appear to shrink non-headquarter employment in the state relative to firms whose headquarters stay in California,” the Public Policy Institute said in a 2025 brief. “Job loss due to relocation appears mostly limited to headquarter jobs.”

Indeed, SpaceX still operates a manufacturing factory in Hawthorne. CBRE said in 2020 that it was moving “an extremely small number of operations-related roles” to Dallas, leaving most of its 5,000 California-based employees in-state. Toyota Financial Services said around 2,300 associates would remain in California after it moved to Plano.

As for Public Storage, the company is not abandoning its Glendale roots entirely.

“We’re going to be moving into new space in the Glendale area as well, with a long-term commitment to be in that market,” Boyle said. “It’s about finding the right talent across the country and building the team going forward.”

IDBank is now closer to our compatriots in California. The Bank has opened a Representative Office in the city of Glendale, California.

According to Chairman of the Management Board of IDBank Mher Abrahamyan, the representative office will become a bridge between our compatriots in the diaspora and IDBank. “While being in the United States, they can remotely become IDBank customers and use services, for example, open an account, apply for a mortgage loan, make a deposit, and all this is possible thanks to the Bank’s full digitalization and accessibility from anywhere in the world. The purpose of opening a representative office is to present the Bank’s current and new products to our potential customers in the United States, to establish and maintain communication with our customers,” said Mher Abrahamyan.

Customers can contact the IDBank representative office by phone and receive the necessary information, while to become a customer and use the Bank’s services, it will be necessary to visit IDBank’s official website via this link.

According to Lida Safaryan, Head of IDBank Premium Banking Services Division, IDBank continuously invests in ensuring the convenience of its customers and meeting their financial needs. “We studied the needs of our compatriots living in the United States and came to the conclusion that it is necessary to present IDBank’s services here in California, since many of our compatriots, for example, want to buy an apartment in Armenia with the Bank’s financing, but do not know under what conditions it operates or how they can apply. By contacting us, they will receive the primary necessary information, and the further steps can already be completed remotely through the IDBank website,” said Lida Safaryan.

The IDBank representative office can be contacted by phone at +1-559-599-3333. The representative office is located in the heart of Glendale, and after the initial phone call, a meeting at the office will be scheduled for you if necessary.

Thus, in addition to its extensive activities in Armenia, IDBank is expanding abroad as well, which is in line with the international expansion strategy of the ID Group of companies.

The IDBank representative office in the USA does not provide banking services and does not carry out customer servicing.

THE BANK IS SUPERVISED BY THE CENTRAL BANK OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA