Boxing kangaroo charges woman, 94, in Australian outback

A massive, red boxing kangaroo attacked a 94-year-old Australian woman as she was hanging up wet laundry in remote Queensland Sunday.

"I thought it was going to kill me," Phyllis Johnson, speaking from her Charleville, Queensland hospital bed, told Australia's Courier Mail newspaper. "It was taller than me and it just plowed through the clothes on the washing line straight for me."

The "giant red buck bounded into her Charleville backyard"on Sunday, "knocking her to the ground and kicking her several times," the Courier Mail reported.

"I happened to have a broom nearby, and I just started swinging at it," Johnson recounted. "I bashed it on the head but it kept going for me. Not even the dog would help, it was too frightened."

A Charleville police team that arrived on the scene was forced to use pepper spray after the angry kangaroo turned on them, police told the paper.

"One officer had to deploy his OC spray on the animal and it ran away and saw the other police officer out of the corner of its eye," Charleville Police officer Sen-Sgt. Stephen Perkins told the paper. "The other officer also had to deploy his spray to keep from getting hurt. It's one of the many unusual calls we get out here."

Johnson, who was doing well after her ordeal, said she used to feed the kangaroos but this one was unusually large and inexplicably

angry.

"I used to feed them next door, give them some bread, and they've always been so gentle," she told the paper. "They weren't as big as that one though, and they've never gone for me like that. This one seemed to target me, it was putting its feet into me and kicking."

Wildlife officers and police later trapped the kangaroo, and "are investigating how the animal came to be in the vicinity," the paper reported.