AVON, Conn. (AP) — A hungry black bear stormed into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, scaring several employees and helping himself to 60 cupcakes before driving off.
AVON, Conn. (AP) — A hungry black bear stormed into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, scaring several employees and helping himself to 60 cupcakes before driving off.
Workers at Taste by Spellbound in the town of Avon were loading cakes into a van for delivery Wednesday when the bear appeared. There are between 1,000 and 1,200 black bears living in Connecticut, the state environmental agency says, with sightings last year in 158 of the state’s 169 towns and cities.
Bakery owner Miriam Stephens wrote in an Instagram post that she heard employee Maureen Williams “screaming fucking murder” and yelling that there was a bear in the garage.
Williams told television station WTNH that she yelled to scare the bear away, but it backed off and came back three times.
Williams said the bear charged her, so she got out of the garage and ran.
Surveillance video obtained by WTNH shows bakery workers walking around the side of the business to try to scare off the bear, but then run away after it scares them off.
The video shows the bear dragging a container of cupcakes from the garage to the parking lot. Stephens said that the bear ate 60 cupcakes.
A baker eventually made the bear leave by honking a car horn, Williams said.
The four-legged thief was gone when police and officers from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection arrived.
No one was injured in the encounter, one in a series of troubling interactions between black bears and humans in Connecticut.
A 74-year-old woman suffered bites to her arms and legs last month when she was attacked by a bear while walking her dog in a Hartford suburb, the first such attack this year. There were two attacks last year, including one in October where a 10-year-old boy was mauled in a backyard.
“The frequency and severity of bear-human interactions is increasing,” DEEP spokesman Paul Copleman said Friday.
Statistics compiled by the department show there were a record 67 reports of bears entering Connecticut homes in 2022. The previous record was 45 in 2020.
On Friday, a bear cub wandered into a neighborhood near downtown Hartford and climbed up a tree. The police blocked the street while the authorities decided how to handle the situation. The bear was still in the tree on Friday afternoon.
The Associated Press
