A Juneau resident shot and wounded a yearling black bear that had been rummaging through trash downtown on Thursday morning. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game euthanized the bear soon after. The unknown resident who shot it could face criminal charges.
Heather Hintze, a Juneau resident, witnessed the shooting just before 10 a.m. off of Willoughby Ave.
“I was looking out a window and I saw a guy kind of pump some sort of gun — it looked like a long, barrel gun — and shot a bear out of a tree,” Hintze said. “The bear fell, and the person left the scene.”
She called 911. While she was on the phone, she said she watched the bear as it tried to climb the tree again, fell and then crawled under a trailer next to it.
According to Alaska state law, a bear can be killed in defense of life or property, but not if the bear was attracted to the property due to negligently unsecured trash. It’s also against a Juneau city ordinance to discharge a firearm near a public street in Juneau.
Hannah Manninen is the assistant area biologist for Fish and Game in Juneau. She said Juneau police officers were already on the scene when she and a colleague arrived around 10:30 a.m.
“The bear had been mortally wounded and was under a trailer type of situation, like a semi truck trailer,” Manninen said.
She said her colleague euthanized the yearling with a shotgun. When they examined the bear later, Manninen said it looked like the gunshot fired by the resident had punctured a lung.
Prior to the bear’s death, Manninen said she heard that people had been harassing two yearling bears on that block, which she said appeared to be a sibling pair.
“Firecrackers, something of the sort, being deployed either at one or at both of them,” she said.
When she was on the scene, Manninen said she saw the uninjured bear rummaging through trash on the ground. That bear is still hanging around the area as of Friday afternoon.
“Those bears and other bears have been attracted to downtown because of unsecured trash,” Manninen said.
She called this an “unfortunate situation” and said that as long as people fail to follow the city ordinance that requires trash to be secured, bears will continue to come downtown.
Krag Campbell, the deputy chief of police for the Juneau Police Department, said the incident is under investigation.
“Was there something going on with the bear … where it may be reasonable or unreasonable to shoot it — that’s still unknown,” Campbell said. “[We’re] trying to determine if it was a BB gun or a real gun, and then trying to determine who the person was that shot the bear.”
Campbell said police haven’t yet contacted the people of interest in the case. He said the department is also working with Alaska Wildlife Troopers.
Disclosure: The witness who saw the shooting is the spouse of a KTOO employee.
