Antoine Yates’s neighbors took notice of the exotic little pet he brought back one day to his Harlem housing project 20 years ago.

“I remember him bringing home this little tiger cub,” Jerome Applewhite, a former neighbor, recalled in an interview on Monday. “When he told me what it was, I knew it was going to grow up to be some big animal.”

Yes, it really was a Bengal tiger cub, and it indeed grew into a 400-pound behemoth mostly during the three years it spent in Apartment 5E of the Drew Hamilton Houses under the loving care of Mr. Yates, a cabdriver who was then in his mid-30s.

Mr. Yates named him Ming and kept him, as he would later be quoted, “to show the whole world that we could all get along.”