This is what happens when a bear gets into your Subaru
This story about a bear somehow getting stuck inside a Subaru is what we need right now.
Don’t worry, it ends well: The bear eventually gets out, thanks to sheriff’s deputies who freed the animal in Jefferson County, Colo.
Annie Bruecker, 17, just got the 2004 Subaru a few months ago and uses the car to drive to a summer job, she told ABC affiliate KMGH. But she didn’t lock the doors Monday night, which apparently puts you at risk for a bear break-in. (The more you know!)
“My mom screamed from downstairs and I thought that I was in trouble,” Bruecker told KMGH. “She said, ‘Annie, there’s a bear in your car.’ ”
Um, come again?
“He’s tossing stuff in the back basically and then you can see the ceilings of my car just ripped and I was like, I’m not going to work today,” the teen told Fox affiliate KDVR.
Yeah, no kidding.
Two deputies with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office — a department that has plenty of experience with animal-related calls — responded Tuesday.
The bear had somehow entered and locked itself inside the car, and the deputies couldn’t figure out how, the department said in a statement.
“No windows were broken. The door handles weren’t the kind you lift up. And yet somehow this medium-sized bear managed to open a door, crawl inside and close the door behind him,” according to the department. “Deputies could tell by all the moisture on the windows that he’d clearly been inside for a while.
“Given the size of the bear, they also wondered if there was a mama bear nearby.”
The bear does look kind of small, though large enough to inflict some serious auto damage.
As one deputy approached the car, the bear clawed at the window.
“Yeah, stay away from me, bear,” the deputy can be heard saying in the video. “He’s clawing at stuff. I hope he doesn’t hit the latch.”
The deputies eventually decided the safest thing to do would be to pop open the hatch.
But the door wouldn’t open with the key fob button, the department said.
So one deputy had to manually open the car’s door. As in, be physically close to a Subaru with a distressed bear trapped inside.
Another deputy stood nearby with a shotgun — “just in case,” the department said.
“Thankfully once the door was open the bear had no interest in deputies, only in getting back into the wild,” the sheriff’s office said.
“The whole ceiling was ripped,” Bruecker told KDVR. “The plastic sunroof cover was ripped out. My steering wheel was chewed. My neighbor actually described it as someone put a grenade in there and it just went off.”
Apparently, this is a thing. Last summer, a bear climbed into a pickup truck in Jefferson County and locked itself inside.
“I don’t know if a bear [poops] in the woods, but it [poops] in my wife’s truck,” Dave Masters told the Denver Post after that incident.
The bear that got stuck in the Subaru appears to be a black bear, the newspaper reported.
It’s not uncommon to run into bears roaming around Colorado, though grizzly bears are no longer found in the state.
“Black bears are not naturally aggressive, but they are strong, powerful animals,” according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “A bear intent on getting a meal can easily injure someone who gets in its way.”
Or, you know … a Subaru.
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