Panicked woman to 911: ‘Oh my God! A bear is in my house!’
The dispatcher didn’t even get a chance to finish her first sentence.
“9-1-1, what is your emer…”
“Oh my God! A bear is in my house!” the woman on the other end of the line yells in a panic.
“Inside the house?”
“INSIDE the house!”
“Is everybody out of the house?”
“No! Just me, I’m in the house!”
For about eight minutes Wednesday, a Duarte woman hid in fear, locked in her bathroom, while a 1-year-old bear scrounged through her kitchen.
“He’s not interested in you, OK?” the 911 dispatcher reassured the woman. “He’s interested in whatever food he can find downstairs.”
The bear, possibly lured by the smell of food or trash, entered the kitchen just before 2 p.m. Wednesday through a window in the 70 block of Crestview Court, police said.
“I heard him breaking in ‘cause I heard something and I said ‘What’s going on?” and I went downstairs and I went ‘Oh my God!’ I thought someone had broken into my house ... and I looked out the door,” the woman said.
“Not exactly the guest you expected, huh?” the dispatcher replied.
As the woman hid upstairs, sheriff’s deputies and Duarte animal-control officers arrived and scared the bear off. No one was injured, including the bear, officials said.
The incident was the second caper by an Angeles National Forest bear on Wednesday. Earlier in the morning, a bear roamed a Sun Valley neighborhood until it was tranquilized and released in the forest.
The Sun Valley bear also made an appearance in La Cañada Flintridge earlier in the month, a state Fish and Wildlife official said.
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