Bear honks horn then takes car on short joyride

A horn honking for 45 minutes brought Douglas County sheriff's deputies to a Larkspur home where they discovered a bear trapped inside a vehicle. "At 3:28 this morning a neighbour called in a suspicious vehicle because a horn had been honking for 45 minutes. Deputies responded and discovered a bear in the car," said Deputy Michelle Rademacher. "I was in bed and my mom and dad came rushing in saying, 'Did you lock your car today?' I said 'No.' My dad's like, 'It's gone.' At that point I was freaking out, and he said, 'It's a bear. There is a bear trapped in the car,'" said the car's owner, 17-year-old Ben Story.

Ben's father, Ralph, said the bear hit the shifter and the car rolled backward about 125 feet, off the driveway, down an embankment and into some trees on Eagle Road near Tenderfoot Drive. "So this bear opened the door on his own. Somehow the door closed behind him. He panicked and started thrashing around, hit the shifter and put the car, took it out of park," Ralph said. "It rolled back, down over the hill, and down into here, and stopped. The four way flashers were on. It's like he knew what was going on, and kept hitting the horn."



Ben told said he had left a sandwich in the car and that may have attracted the big bear. "It was a pretty good size, actually it was pretty big. If you look at the inside of the car, there's nothing left at all. You could see it moving around, it like took up the entire inside of the car," said Ben. "When the cop came up to the car, he thought it was a bunch of kids goofing around. He put a flashlight on it. And he saw this bear turn around, in the driver's seat, and he turned around and looked at him. And when the cop saw that he said he never ran so fast in his life," Ralph said.



Ralph said sheriff's deputies eventually got the bear out of the car by tying a long rope to the door handle to open it. Eventually the bear wandered off back into the woods at around 5 a.m. The bear appeared "freaked out" about being trapped in the four-door Toyota sedan and totally shredded the inside, Ben said. "It definitely is not what you expect to wake up every morning, to hear there's a bear in your car, and your car's at the bottom of the driveway, torn up, nothing's left on the inside," Ben said.

After eating the sandwich, the bruin left a calling card in the young man's car. "He went to the bathroom in there and it's pretty rank," the 17-year old said. Ralph said when he received the first phone call before dawn he feared the worst. He said he was only hearing his wife's responses to the deputies on the phone, and she kept repeating "Oh my god." Ralph said the car was parked beside the house but he didn't hear the constantly honking horn because he sleeps with earplugs and the bedrooms are on the other side of the house.

With additional news video.