Black Bear Gets Trapped in Teacher's Car, Destroys It
An art teacher made a surprising discovery when she found a black bear rummaging around in her car.
The bear eventually fled the scene without causing anyone any harm, although the interior of the car was destroyed, THV11 reported.
Mary Jane Yarbrough, a teacher at Warner Robins High School in Houston County, Georgia, was staying in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to take an art class in preparation for the next school year.
But one morning, halfway through the week-long class, the teacher woke up to the sound of a car horn honking.
"It was six in the morning and I just keep hearing honking happening," Yarbrough told THV11.
Initially, the teacher said she thought something was wrong with her neighbor.
"I open the door. My dog is going crazy and I see that it's my car that is honking and shaking and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, someone is in there. Someone is stuck in my car.'"
Upon closer inspection, Yarbrough realized that it wasn't a person in the car but a black bear.
"The bear actually like smacked the window and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, that's a bear,'" Yarbrough told THV11. "It was just disbelief. Like there is no way."
After spotting the bear, the teacher called the police to ask for assistance in removing the bear from the car—a Toyota Camry.
Eventually, a police officer managed to shepherd the bear out of the vehicle, but not before the animal had destroyed the interior.
"He ripped the dash, my airbag, the radio is out, he went through my glove box," Yarbrough said.
The teacher did not see the bear entering the car, but she said the vehicle was on a slight tilt. She thinks the bear managed to open one of the doors, clambered in but then got stuck after the door shut behind it.
She said the only things that were in the car were chewing gum and a protein bar, but the bear didn't eat either of them.
Yarbrough is not the only American to have come face-to-face with a bear recently. On Wednesday, incredible home surveillance video footage emerged of a California teen pushing a bear off her backyard wall to protect the family's dogs.
"I had about, I'd say, two seconds to think and the first thing that popped into my head was to push the bear off the ledge," 17-year-old Bradbury resident Hailey Morinico told CNN on Wednesday.
