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(Updated 9:02 p.m., March 10) -- Clarissa Langston was returning from her parents’ home Sunday night when she noticed something sitting in the grassy median on Pine Ridge Road.

She and her husband turned their truck around and pulled onto the median between Collier and Logan boulevards for a closer look. Their headlights swept across an injured Florida panther.

“Its paw was as big as my head,’’ said Langston, 23.

The Langstons did what they could to keep traffic and onlookers from spooking the big cat, but about 10 minutes after they arrived, they watched as a vehicle hit the panther as it limped into the eastbound lane, she said.

The male panther, estimated to be 2 to 3 years old, became the first documented panther fatality this year. Road collisions are one of the main causes of panther mortality, scientists say.

“It was the most awful thing I’ve witnessed in my whole life,’’ Langston said.

In 2007, 15 panthers were killed on Florida roads, breaking the previous record of 11, set in 2006. The Florida panther is one of the most endangered animals on the planet, with only 80 to 100 left.

Development is increasingly encroaching into panther habitat, making the number of encounters between humans and panthers more frequent.

Last year, dogs treed a panther in a pine tree in the backyard of a home on 27th Street Southwest in Golden Gate Estates, less than three miles from Sunday’s collision.

That stretch of Pine Ridge Road is bordered by pine woods. The pocket of wilderness, however, is surrounded by ranch homes, gated communities and strip malls.

The Conservation Commission placed the dead animal in a freezer in Naples and plans to transport it to Gainesville, where its bones and hide will be stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Langston said she called the Collier County Sheriff’s Office non-emergency number at 8:50 p.m., about 10 minutes after another man already at the scene had called 911, she said. She said she called 911 when the panther got hit about 9 p.m.

She said a more urgent response from law enforcement might have saved the panther, but Conservation Commission panther biologist Dave Onorato said it is hard to predict what a panther would have done, even if officials had gotten there sooner.

He said the panther could have been injured and in the median after being hit by another vehicle.

The panther was uncollared and did not have a transponder that would have indicated that the Conservation Commission had come across the panther before.

He said his best guess is that the panther was trying to find his own territory after dispersing from either North Belle Meade or Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed along the Lee-Collier county line.

“We can’t say for sure where he came from,’’ Onorato said.

To report injured wildlife or panther roadkill, call the Conservation Commission at 1-800-404-FWCC.