Thursday, May 20th 2021, 5:22 pm
A black bear killed in a Norman neighborhood overnight leaves a community asking questions.
The bear was discovered Wednesday night near Pickard Avenue and Elmwood Drive.
Norman City police called Oklahoma Department of Wildlife game wardens about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday after getting reports of a bear.
“We requested the assistance of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation due to the type of animal involved and the public safety risk,” Sarah Jensen, Norman Police Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The bear spent several hours in a backyard tree before Oklahoma Department of Wildlife game wardens shot it with multiple tranquilizer darts between 3 and 4 a.m. Thursday morning, said Micah Holmes of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife.
Cellphone video shows the 1.5 year old black bear laying under the tree after he was tranquilized and fell.
“The tranquilizer didn’t take as well as it should have, as well as we’d hoped. When that bear came out of the tree, it was injured, it was not fully sedated, and it was on the move,” Holmes said.
Holmes said they made the decision to kill it because there was no safe direction for the bear to leave on its own.
“It's not going to get more tranquilized once it gets on the ground, its going to get less tranquilized. So that's when we decided to dispatch it. Any direction that bear went, it was going to end up in someone else’s backyard,” Holmes said.
Game wardens had planned to sedate the bear and remove it to a safe location, but the tranquilizer did not have the intended affect.
Holmes said it's not unusual for bears to be on the move this time of year.
“But what is unusual is to see a bear in an urban situation like this,” he said.
Meredith Dunn owns the home where the bear was spotted. She said she is upset about the bear being killed and does not understand why the incident had to end this way.
“This was a bear that was in our backyard and it should have ended peacefully, and I just don’t understand why it had to end the way it did. The bear had its back to the law enforcement that shot him, and I don’t feel like he ever charged anyone,” Dunn said.
Wildlife officials will be testing the bear’s DNA to determine where it might have originated from. Holmes said there about 2,500 black bears across Oklahoma, which is indicative of a healthy bear population.
Augusta McDonnell joined 9 News in April of 2021. A Montana native, Augusta graduated from the University of Montana in Missoula with a degree in Journalism. She also studied middle eastern civilizations, theology and politics for two years at Biola University in La Mirada, California.
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