Beba the monkey, lost on WSU campus, has died

The monkey didn’t make it.

A marmoset monkey wearing a pink diaper got loose on the Wichita State University campus on Tuesday night, a university spokesman said Wednesday morning.

It died a few hours later, possibly of exposure, said WSU spokesman Joe Kleinsasser.

Beba, as her student owner had named her, was found unresponsive outside Eck Stadium at about 10:30 Wednesday morning, Kleinsasser said.

The temperature fellow below freezing in Wichita on Tuesday night.

Beba was rushed to a veterinarian immediately, Kleinsasser said.

By 11:45 a.m., a campus police officer told Kleinsasser that Beba had not survived.

“Whether it was exposure or not, we don’t know,” he said.

“The monkey has been loose since last night,” Kleinsasser had said earlier Wednesday. “Apparently it’s a student pet, and apparently the student usually keeps it in the car when he’s in class. And apparently it got out of the car.”

Marmosets are New World monkeys with long, fluffy tails; they are native to Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru.

A story about Beba and his owner, WSU student Muhamad Mansour, published in August in the Sunflower, the WSU student newspaper, quoted Mansour as saying that he had raised Beba, bottle-feeding her from the time he acquired her about two years ago in Florida, when she was 2 days old.

Mansour, who told the paper he is a Palestinian studying international business at WSU, said in the story that he’d brought Beba along to Wichita Eisenhower National Airport to help greet international students coming off the planes.

This story was originally published January 25, 2017 at 10:20 AM with the headline "Beba the monkey, lost on WSU campus, has died."