A wild bear snuck up on, mauled, and killed a man in Arizona as he sat drinking coffee at his campsite, in what authorities are calling an incredibly rare unprovoked attack.
The mauling—which authorities described as “predatory in nature”—unfolded in the early morning hours on Friday near Prescott, Arizona.
According to the Arizona Game and Fish Department, a massive black bear took 66-year-old Steve Jackson unaware as he sat at a table on his property, dragging him down an embankment for 75 feet.
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Neighbors reportedly heard Jackson’s screams for help and tried to intervene but to no avail.
“They tried to get the bear to stop attacking him, there was honking horns, different things they were doing,” Sheriff David Rhodes said in a statement. “There was no success in stopping the attack.”
The animal only relented when one bystander shot it with a rifle, according to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office. By then, it was too late.
“Unfortunately, by that time Mr. Jackson has succumbed to his horrible injuries,” Rhodes said.
When local police arrived in the densely wooded area, they found both Jackson and the killer bear dead. Estimates placed the animal at 300 pounds and between 6 and 10 years old, according to local news station AZFamily.
Jackson, whose family lives in another state, was reportedly in the area to build a cabin on his piece of land.
Authorities characterized the death as highly unusual, noting it’s only the second fatal bear attack in Arizona since 1990, with the last one occurring in 2011.
The local sheriff’s office couldn’t immediately identify anything at Jackson’s campsite—such as food—that would’ve provoked the bear, either.
The Game and Fish Department plans to test the animal’s carcass for disease or anything else that might have caused the highly unusual mauling.
“This was an especially aggressive, unprovoked attack that reminds us that wildlife can be unpredictable,” Todd Geiler, a member of the Arizona Game and Fish Commission, said in the department’s statement.
Read it at AZFamily
