Four trapped bears await death sentance

Pending DNA confirmation, captred sow and 3 cubs will be killed

COOKE CITY, Mont. — Montana Department of Fish, WIldlife, and Parks (MFWP) officials have captured a 300 - 400 lb. grizzly sow that went berserk in a Montana campground, fatally mauling Kevin Kammer, 48, of Grand Rapids, MI. Two other people were injured in the attack, which took place around 2 a.m. Wednesday, July 28 in Soda Butte Campground on the Gallatin National Forest northeast of Yellowstone. Witnesses said the sow was with three yearling cubs.

MFWP officials say Kammer was by himself in a tent when the attack happened. He was found at around 4 .M. about 25 feet from his tent by a team of state park investigators dispatched to the area on a report of a bear attack. He was a husband and father of four children, ages 8,9, 15 and 19 and he was alone on a fly-fishing vacation.

 

The sow and two of her three cubs had been trapped by Thursday while the final year-old cub was found in a culvert trap early Friday. The bears, still held in the culvert traps, left the Soda Butte campground in a three-truck convoy Friday morning for the state wildlife lab in Bozeman.

 

Fibers from a tent or sleeping bag were in the captured bears' droppings, and a tooth fragment found in a tent appears to match a chipped tooth on the 300- to 400-pound sow. But officials say they will decide the bears' fate only after seeing the results of DNA tests that are expected Friday.

"Everything points to it being the offending bear, but we are not going to do anything until we have DNA samples," said MFWP spokesman, Ron Aasheim.

Evidence indicates all three cubs lparticipated in what MFWP Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard called a sustained attack on Kevin Kammer of Grand Rapids, Mich. He was pulled out his tent and dragged 25 feet and the bears fed on his body.

The two other victims, Deb Freele of London, Ontario, and Ronald Singer, of Alamosa, Colo., were hospitalized in Cody, Wyo. Singer, 21, was treated and released, and Freele was scheduled to have surgery Friday for bite wounds and a broken bone in her arm, said West Park Hospital spokesman Joel Hunt.

 

Freele says she was bit on her arm and leg before she played dead so the animal would leave her alone. Freele said on Thursday's network morning talk shows that she wants to thank the people in the next campground who helped rescue her after the bear left the area. Freele is a frequent camper who says she's ready to go camping again despite the trauma.

When he heard the first scream in a campground outside Yellowstone National Park, Don Wilhelm thought it was just teenagers, maybe a domestic dispute in the middlle of the night. The Texas wildlife biologist, interviewed by numerous television and newspaper crews, said he tried to go back to sleep, stifling thoughts that a beast might be lurking outside his family's tent.

Minutes later, another scream — this one coming from the next campsite over, where a bear had torn through a tent and sunk its teeth into Freele's arm.

"First she said, "No!' Then we heard her say, 'It's a bear! I've been attacked by a bear!" said Wilhelm's wife, Paige.

By that point, the bear already had ripped into another tent a few campsites away, chomping into the leg of a teenager who had been sleeping with his family. Wilhelm later would find out that a solo camper at the other end of the heavily occupied campground had been killed in the rampage.

But in the pitch-black wilderness, the Wilhelms had only sounds to go on: The yells from the teenager and his sister, Freele's screaming "No!" and the snorting noises from the bear as it sniffed around the campground. And then, finally, quiet.

After a quick parental back-and-forth over whether to shield their 9- and 12-year-old sons with their bodies or make a break for it, the Wilhelms darted to their SUV. They drove around the campground, honking their horns and yelling out the windows to alert other campers. Along the way, they met a truck leaving the campground with the second victim — a teenager who apparently tried to fight off the bear by punching it in the nose.

"It was like a nightmare, couldn't possibly happen," Paige Wilhelm said later. Added Don Wilhelm: "Words cannot describe what it's like to hear someone attacked by a bear."

The campground, also the site of the historic Cooke City cemetery, was closed.

The same campground was the site of a 2008 attack in which a grizzly bear bit and injured a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days later and transported to a bear research center at Washington State University in Pullman. Some Cooke City folks say wildlife officials may have caught the wrong bear. About 600 grizzly bears and hundreds of less-aggressive black bears live in the Yellowstone area.

The region is pasted with hundreds of signs warning visitors to keep food out of the bruins' reach. Experts say that bears who eat human food quickly become habituated to people, increasing the danger of an attack.

Yet in the case of the Soda Butte Campground attack, all the victims had put their food into metal food canisters installed at campsite, Sheppard said.

"They were doing things right," Sheppard said. "It was random. I have no idea why this bear picked these three tents out of all the tents there."

The 10-acre ampground has 27 sites and is just off the mountainous Beartooth Highway about 125 miles southwest of Billings.

This is part of the online edition of The Island Park News.

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