And this, friends, is why we do not leave sandwiches in our cars. 17-year-old Ben Story of Larkspur, Colorado, left a peanut butter and jelly in his Toyota one night, and forgot to lock up. A few hours after he crawled off to bed, his parents and neighbors woke up to the sound of a car horn honking—for 45 minutes straight. ‘Twas a panicking bear trapped inside the vehicle.
Ben’s father, Ralph, said the bear hit the shifter and the car rolled backward about 125 feet, off the driveway, down an embankment and into some trees on Eagle Road near Tenderfoot Drive.
“So this bear opened the door on his own. Somehow the door closed behind him. He panicked and started thrashing around, hit the shifter and put the car, took it out of park,” Ralph said. “It rolled back, down over the hill, and down into here, and stopped. The four way flashers were on. It’s like he knew what was going on, and kept hitting the horn.”
Ben told 7NEWS he had left a sandwich in the car and that may have attracted the big bear.“It was a pretty good size, actually it was pretty big. If you look at the inside of the car, there’s nothing left at all. You could see it moving around, it like took up the entire inside of the car,” said Ben.
(…) The bear appeared “freaked out” about being trapped in the four-door Toyota sedan and totally shredded the inside, Ben said.
If the bear’s a-rockin’, don’t come knockin’. Sheriffs eventually managed to open the car door with a rope so the poor feller could get out. He lumbered back into the woods, presumably seeking a glass of milk with which to chase the pilfered PBJ. Before his exit, he thoughtfully left a “gift” for the car’s owner in the back seat.
KMGH Denver, Denver Post, Fox, San Jose Mercury News, CNN.
(Photograph courtesy Story family / Pedobear courtesy Pedobear)