Creature Comes by Night to Northridge : Awakened by Barking of Dogs, He Finds a Bear of a Trespasser

Alan Perches said he felt a little sheepish Saturday morning when he saw a large black bear outside his Northridge home and nobody seemed to believe him.

Perches, 44, said he was awakened by his dogs’ barking shortly before 1 a.m. He opened his front door and saw a 200- to 300-pound black bear walking in the street in front of his home in a hilly residential area north of Rinaldi Street and west of Reseda Boulevard.

The bear, fender-high to a neighbor’s Cadillac, walked on all fours into a neighbor’s yard.

Wife Was Skeptical

“Sure, Al. Yeah, sure there’s a bear out in the front yard,” his wife, Marilyn, said when he woke her to tell her.

The person on the 911 emergency line was polite but equally dubious. When a police helicopter and ground unit came to the Perches’ home in the 18700 block of Algiers Street and couldn’t find any sign of the bear, Perches said, “I felt like a damn fool.”

“I really did see a bear and I haven’t been drinking,” he said he told police.

But Perches was vindicated about an hour later when he saw four police cars and an animal regulation truck parked on Dulcet Avenue around the corner from his house.

“I got out and walked over and asked one of the police officers, ‘Has anybody else seen it?’ He said, ‘Hell yes, he walked right in front of the police car. He darn near ran over the car.’ I said to the officer, ‘Hey, would you mind coming over here for a minute and telling my wife?’ ”

Police and animal control officers chased the bear up a driveway, and then lost him behind a house, police said. Two animal control officers, assisted by a police helicopter, continued searching the hills until shortly after noon Saturday, but gave up without finding the bear.

‘Could Be Miles From Here’

“He may be curled up in somebody’s backyard, sleeping, or he could be by now several miles from here or back up into his own territory,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Bill Fleming.

Theresa Micjan, an animal control officer with the city Department of Animal Regulation, said the bear probably wandered away from a nearby canyon.

Micjan said that although her department’s officers were armed with equipment to kill the bear, they would do so “only if it comes down to the public’s health and safety. If the bear were to go wild and start going after the citizens, then the animal would more than likely be shot, but that’s only as a last resort.”

In June, 1982, a 6-foot bear wandered into Granada Hills and was shot by a Los Angeles police officer when he lunged at an animal control officer.

Perches, who has lived in the neighborhood 13 years, said wild animals were a common sight before the Simi Valley Freeway was finished in January, 1983.

“We had raccoons and possums and coyotes and road runner birds and big white-faced owls that used to live in our trees in the backyard,” he said. But even then, he added, “I don’t know too many in Northridge that have seen bears in their front yards.”