In the video, the bear walks down the coffee and soft drink aisle of a Dollar General store, turns left at the ice cream freezer, and advances past the Campbell’s soup and mac and cheese.
“This is not good,” the man taking the video says. “No,” a woman agrees.
The whole thing was definitely not good. A bear was walking slowly through a discount store in a strip mall along a highway in the rural reaches of northern New Jersey, and it seemed confused. The bear looked left, looked right, padded along past shelves of tinfoil and dish soap, walked right past displays of popcorn balls and Doritos.
“Come on boy, come on,” says the man taking the video, trying to lead the bear to the exit.
At this point — approximately 4 p.m. on Tuesday — the bear had already scratched or bitten a 90-year-old woman in the store, the Vernon Township police said. She was apparently unfazed: Christine Flohr, 55, a budtender at the cannabis store next door, walked into the Dollar General to witness the excitement, saw the woman in the aisles and urged her to leave.
“I told her, ‘There’s a bear in the store.’ She said, ‘I know, he swiped at me,’” Ms. Flohr said. The woman kept shopping. “I found that odd,” said Ms. Flohr.
The bear eventually left the store. But things did not end well for the bear.
Black bears are not an uncommon sight in Sussex County, in the Appalachian highlands. As of Aug. 21, there had been 294 bear “incidents” in Sussex County this year, by far the most of any county in the state, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Incidents include both simple sightings and encounters like “attempted home entry” or “livestock kill.” There is no category for bears in commercial establishments.
This bear, a 175-pound female, had been wandering among the parking lots of State Route 94 for several hours. The police first encountered it at 1:39 p.m., they said, and chased it from the Dollar General parking lot. “They hit the bear with rubber buckshot,” said Aaron Glading, the owner of Goodfella’s, the restaurant next door, “but it didn’t affect the bear at all. It was in a daze, just roaming around.”
Two hours later, the bear was back outside Goodfella’s and confronted Mr. Glading’s German shepherd, Lucky. “The bear tackled my dog, but he didn’t even bite my dog — no scratch marks, nothing,” Mr. Glading said. “We have a bear here that comes every day, 300-400 pounds, we call him Frankie. He comes to the dumpster. If you get within 10 feet of him, he takes off.” This bear, he said, was different. “One-hundred-twenty percent, there was something wrong with this bear.”
Ten minutes or so after that, Sean F. Clarkin, a real estate agent, stopped into the Dollar General. “I have a new listing a few minutes away and I went to buy some cleaning materials, spruce up the windows, that kind of thing,” he said.
When he saw the bear, he started filming as he tried to figure out how to get it out of the store. “You got a back door here somewhere?” he yells at one point.
There is an urgency in Mr. Clarkin’s voice as the bear follows him down the aisles, but he said Wednesday that he was not scared.
“I’m a real estate agent, and when you take a listing for $700,000, or someone’s trusting you to sell their house for a million dollars, you’ve got to knock out the problems as they come up,” said Mr. Clarkin, 65. “I was in the middle of staging a house, and I went to the store to get some cleaning supplies, and there was a bear in the store. Getting the bear out of the store seemed like the thing to do.”
Besides, Mr. Clarkin said, the bear did not seem particularly threatening. “This bear was sick in some manner,” he said. “That’s kind of why he wasn’t waving his arms and knocking things over. He was just like a really hung-over bear, trying to make it through the day.”
That the bear did not do. By the time the bear left the store, there were police cars in the parking lot and a big crowd had assembled. The bear tried to go back into the store but Mr. Clarkin blocked its path with a shopping cart. The bear had already engaged in two of what the Department of Environmental Protection classifies as “Category 1” behaviors: “human attack” and “unprovoked dog attack.” When the bear crossed Route 94, an officer raised his gun.
“My heart sank when I heard the gunshot,” Ms. Flohr said. “I saw the bear go down, flailing and writhing in pain.”
State environmental workers collected the bear’s remains for rabies testing. The results will be back in one to three days.
Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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