A young male bear with an appetite for confection plummeted through the skylight of a couple’s home in Alaska as they prepped for a baby’s first birthday party.
Homeowners Glen Merrill and Alicia Bishop talked about the wild scene. Merrill said, “I was literally in the room, and I heard this cracking. And the next thing you know, there’s this bear that, I mean, literally, fell right from the skylight. It was like one meter away from me.”
Bishop added that the bear started eating the lemon blueberry and peanut butter cupcakes that she had put out for her son Jackson’s birthday.
After grandparents took Jackson upstairs, Merrill and Bishop opened a door that led outside and yelled at the cupcake eating young boy bear, said to have weighed around 180 lbs, until he eventually left the home. When the bear tried to return they called 911 and sprayed mace at it, leading the animal to retreat to the woods.
Ryan Scott of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game discussed the commonality of bears in his neck of the woods:
“There probably isn’t a neighborhood or place where we have homes where the potential isn’t there for you to run into a bear or observe a bear. There is really no place where the potential isn’t there.”
Police ended up shooting and killing a bear, believed to be the same one, 30 minutes later when it entered a nearby home that also had people inside. “We don’t take killing or destroying bears lightly. People were inside that building. I think it was appropriate for that given the situation,” Scott said.
