A hungry black bear bursts into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, frightens several employees and helps itself to 60 cupcakes before getting away with the ambush.
Employees of Taste By Spellbound in the city of Avon were loading cakes into a van for delivery on Wednesday when the bear appeared. Between 1,000 and 1,200 black bears live in Connecticut, the state environmental agency says, with sightings in 158 of the state’s 169 towns and cities last year.
Bakery owner Miriam Stephens wrote in an Instagram post that she heard employee Maureen Williams yelling “bloody murder” and that there was a bear in the garage.
Williams told TV station WTNH that she shouted to scare off the bear but it backed away and came back three times.
Williams said the bear attacked her so she got out of the garage and ran.
Surveillance video obtained by WTNH shows bakery employees walking around the side of the business to try to scare the bear away, but then running after it and scaring them away.
The video shows the bear dragging a container of cupcakes from the garage to the parking lot. Stephens said the bear ate 60 cupcakes.
Williams said that a baker finally let the bear go by honking a car horn.
By the time police and officials from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (Deep) arrived, the four-legged thief had disappeared.
No one was injured in the encounter — just one of a series of troubling recent interactions between black bears and humans in Connecticut.
A 74-year-old woman was bitten on her arm and leg last month when she was attacked by a bear while walking her dog in a suburb of the state capital, Hartford – the first such attack this year. There were two attacks last year, including one in October where a 10-year-old boy was killed in a backyard.
“The frequency and severity of bear-human interactions are increasing,” Paul Kopleman, a spokesman for the Deep, said Friday.
Figures compiled by the department show there were a record 67 reports of bears entering Connecticut homes in 2022. The previous record was 45 in 2020.
